Women and Men by the Bento Shop

This Art Institute of Chicago surimono presents an Edo genre scene of women and men gathered by a bento shop - the kind of street-corner food stall that punctuated the city's commercial districts and served travelers, day-laborers, and pleasure-seekers alike. The choice of subject reflects the surimono tradition's interest in everyday Edo life filtered through the cultivated eye of kyoka poets, who relished images of the city that they could see in their own daily experience. Hokkei renders the group with attention to the postures and gestures of casual interaction - figures pausing, reaching for food, conversing - and the architectural setting provides the cue of place. Such genre scenes in the surimono format often carried mitate undertones, with seemingly ordinary characters alluding to classical or theatrical subjects that the inscribed kyoka would have made explicit. The bento shop subject would have engaged the food culture of Edo, an important strand of urban identity that kyoka poets celebrated. The Art Institute's impression preserves the refined printing and saturated color characteristic of Hokkei's surimono practice.