Willow Island (Yanagishima), from the series "A Series of Willows (Yanagi bantsuzuki)"

Willow Island (Yanagishima) is one of the sheets in A Series of Willows (Yanagi bantsuzuki), a surimono series Totoya Hokkei designed in 1823 around the theme of the willow tree, a long-established motif in Japanese poetry and visual art. Each print in the set linked a particular willow-associated place or scene with kyoka verses contributed by members of the commissioning poetry circle, giving the entire group of designs a coherent literary structure. Yanagishima, an area in Edo named for its willows, was a familiar reference point for the city's poets and provided the perfect anchor for one of the sheets in the set. Hokkei renders the location with the careful drawing and balanced composition characteristic of his Hokusai school training; the soft tonalities and willow imagery would have provided ample opportunity for refined pigment gradations, while the inscribed verses anchored the print's literary purpose. Trained directly under Katsushika Hokusai, Totoya Hokkei specialized in surimono more single-mindedly than most of his peers, and the willow series exemplifies his ability to sustain a unifying theme across multiple sheets of a single commission. The Art Institute of Chicago preserves this impression under accession entry 81024, contributing to the corpus of surviving prints by which the Yanagi bantsuzuki set can be reconstructed. Within Hokkei's wider output of the 1820s, the willow series represents an especially clear example of how Hokusai school designers worked with poetry clubs to develop themed sequences that combined visual coherence with literary depth.