Yugao, from the series "Fifty-four Chapters of the Tale of Genji (Genji monogatari gojuyonjo)"

Yugao, the moonflower-named woman whose mysterious death in an abandoned residence is one of the early high points of Murasaki Shikibu's Tale of Genji, supplies both the chapter title and the imagery for this 1852 print from Utagawa Hiroshige's series Fifty-four Chapters of the Tale of Genji (Genji monogatari gojuyonjo). The series gave Hiroshige a chance to step outside his usual territory of Edo ukiyo-e landscape prints and engage with classical literature, then enjoying enormous popularity in the parodic Inaka Genji vein of contemporary fiction. In his Yugao sheet the artist focuses on the symbolic moonflower vine clambering over a rustic gate or fence, the flower whose evening bloom gives the chapter its name and which Yugao herself sends out to Genji as a token wrapped in a poem. The Art Institute of Chicago's impression preserves the delicate, predominantly cool palette Hiroshige uses across the series, with twilight tones evoking the autumnal melancholy of the chapter. Even when working in literary subject matter, Hiroshige tilts the composition toward landscape, treating the vine, gate, and surrounding garden as the principal subject and leaving human action implied. The result is a print that functions both as a refined reference to a thousand-year-old narrative and as a free-standing study in plant form, atmosphere, and color, characteristic of his late Edo career.