Woman with book sitting next to a New Year pull toy

Woman with Book Sitting Next to a New Year Pull Toy is a quiet domestic surimono by Totoya Hokkei, in which a young woman pauses over a book beside a wheeled toy of the kind associated with the New Year season. The pull toy — typically a small wooden cart with a zodiac animal or auspicious figure on top — would have been recognized at once by an early-nineteenth-century Edo audience as a marker of festive time, while the book reinforces the connection between the woman, literary culture, and the kyōka verses that surimono of this kind typically carried. Hokkei trained in the Hokusai school and his treatment of female figures shows that school's careful interest in posture, drapery, and small gestures of attention. The Edo kyoka-e medium itself adds material richness: heavy paper, controlled color, embossing, and metallic pigments that animate the surface even though the composition itself is small and contained. The Art Institute of Chicago holds the impression within its substantial Hokkei collection, where it is one of several surimono that pair women, books, and New Year objects in finely calibrated arrangements. The print is a representative example of how Hokkei sustained an entire career on the careful matching of literary occasion to compact, observed image. Image courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago.