Visiting (Kayoi), from the series "Floating World Versions of the Seven Komachi (Ukiyo Nana Komachi)"

Visiting (Kayoi), from the series Floating World Versions of the Seven Komachi (Ukiyo Nana Komachi), is a color woodblock print designed by Torii Kiyonaga in 1775. The Nana Komachi cycle—seven episodes drawn from the medieval biography of the ninth-century poet Ono no Komachi—was a staple of classical Japanese literature and Nō drama, and a favorite source for the witty mitate-e of Edo ukiyo-e. The Kayoi episode refers to the famous tale of Captain Fukakusa, who had to visit Komachi for one hundred nights in succession to prove his love; he died on the ninety-ninth, transforming the story into one of the great accounts of frustrated devotion. Kiyonaga's series translates each Komachi episode into the elegant idiom of contemporary Edo, replacing the Heian poet and her suitor with a fashionable young woman and her admirer or attendant in modern dress, so that the classical narrative becomes a flattering scaffold for bijin-ga elegance. As a designer within the Torii school of woodblock artists, Kiyonaga participates in the broader Edo bijin-ga fashion for literary mitate, lending intellectual weight to images that are at heart about contemporary fashion and feeling. The Art Institute of Chicago, which holds this impression, places the sheet within Kiyonaga's productive mid-1770s output. The composition typically pairs a figure visiting in the evening with a woman waiting indoors, color restrained and harmonious. For modern viewers, the print captures the wonderfully layered Edo habit of seeing one's own romantic life through the optics of classical Japanese literature.