Fans decorated with motifs of the three auspicious dreams of the New Year

In this surimono Totoya Hokkei takes up one of the most enduring New Year conceits in Japanese culture: the three auspicious dreams said to bring good fortune in the coming year — Mount Fuji, a hawk, and an eggplant. Rather than depicting the dreams directly, the design represents them as motifs painted onto a group of folding fans, an elegant doubling in which a luxury object (the fan) carries a wished-for image (the dream). Such conceits were precisely the kind of literary and visual play that Edo kyoka-e poetry circles loved, and surimono of this kind were almost always commissioned to mark the New Year. Hokkei's Hokusai school training served him well in this genre: he could draw the disparate elements with conviction and then arrange them across the fans with the spatial confidence that surimono required. The Art Institute of Chicago holds the impression within its broad nineteenth-century surimono collection, where it sits among other Hokkei still-life and emblematic compositions. The print is a good example of how the highest-end New Year surimono compressed wishes for prosperity into refined visual puzzles, layered with allusions to dream lore, seasonal practice, and the conventional iconography of the festive new year. Image courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago.