Sea turtles and Urashima Taro

Totoya Hokkei's 1820 surimono of Sea turtles and Urashima Taro draws on one of the most beloved tales in Japanese folklore: the fisherman who rescues a sea turtle and is conducted to the undersea Dragon Palace, returning to the surface only to find that lifetimes have passed. As a senior pupil of the Hokusai school, Hokkei was deeply familiar with the legend cycle that his teacher Katsushika Hokusai had revisited many times in book illustration. Surimono of this period, commissioned by Edo kyoka-e poetry clubs, allowed designers to treat such tales with both narrative directness and decorative refinement, and the Urashima story offered a natural pairing of human figure, marine creature and atmospheric water that suited the format. The Art Institute of Chicago records the sheet with a 1820 date, placing it within the most fertile years of Hokkei's surimono production. Printed in a small edition for a kyoka club, the work would have carried kyoka verses alongside its image; the poems often turned on auspicious associations between turtles, which symbolize longevity, and the New Year season for which many surimono were issued. The Hokusai-school discipline of drawing, combined with the luxurious printing techniques of surimono such as mica grounds, metallic inks and karazuri embossing, allowed Hokkei to honor the legend's gentle melancholy while supplying connoisseurs with a finely crafted object of literary play.