Girl Leaping from Kiyomizu Temple

An oban yoko-e benizuri-e by Torii Kiyotsune showing a young woman in mid-leap from the high wooden stage of Kiyomizu-dera, the celebrated Buddhist temple complex perched on the steep eastern hills of Kyoto. The 'leap from Kiyomizu' (Kiyomizu no butai kara tobi-oriru) had become, by the eighteenth century, a proverbial Japanese expression for any irrevocable and risky decision - a usage drawn from a real Edo-period practice in which devotees believed that surviving a leap from the temple's verandah (some thirteen metres above the slope below) would guarantee the fulfilment of a wish. Temple records document hundreds of such jumps during the Edo period, with a remarkably high survival rate that the steep but forested hillside permitted; the practice was finally banned by the Meiji government in 1872. The image of a young woman in mid-air against the temple's massive wooden support pillars supplied Edo ukiyo-e designers with a striking visual subject combining religious observance with romantic determination. The oban yoko-e (landscape oban) format, larger than the standard hosoban Kiyotsune used for actor prints, allowed him to develop the architectural setting of the temple stage and the falling figure within a horizontally extended composition. Held at the Art Institute of Chicago in the Clarence Buckingham Collection, the print is dated to circa 1765, in the period of Kiyotsune's mature production immediately before the introduction of full-colour nishiki-e.