The Spirit of the Komachi Cherry Tree and Ōtomo no Kuronushi, from the series A Collection of Plays Old and New (Kokon Jōruri zukushi)

The Spirit of the Komachi Cherry Tree and Otomo no Kuronushi belongs to A Collection of Plays Old and New (Kokon Joruri zukushi), a print series by Utagawa Hiroshige (1797-1858) that ventured into the theatrical and literary repertoire of joruri puppet drama. Although Hiroshige is principally remembered for landscape prints, his career within the Utagawa school encompassed bird-and-flower designs, beauties, warriors, and theatre subjects, especially during his earlier years and in series that drew on classical and dramatic material. This image refers to a story in which the spirit of an old cherry tree, identified with the legendary poet Ono no Komachi, encounters Otomo no Kuronushi, one of the Six Poetic Immortals of the Heian period and a figure recurrently associated in noh and joruri with intrigue and poetic rivalry. Hiroshige stages the meeting with the figural conventions of Edo ukiyo-e, supplementing characterization with a setting that owes much to his landscape sensibility, particularly in the treatment of the tree as a presence as expressive as the human protagonists. The Harvard Art Museums hold this impression, where it documents Hiroshige's engagement with the rich body of classical narrative that Edo's theatregoers and readers expected their print artists to be able to evoke, and shows that even within a non-landscape series, his eye for atmosphere remained central.