The Hour of the Dragon (Tatsu no koku), from the series A Yoshiwara Clock (Yoshiwara tokei)

A color ōban woodblock print of 1861 in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, this Hour of the Dragon (Tatsu no koku) belongs to the series A Yoshiwara Clock (Yoshiwara tokei), one of Kuniaki II's late-Bakumatsu bijin-ga productions. The series follows the traditional Japanese twelve-hour clock — each two-hour segment of the day named after a zodiac animal — and pairs each "hour" with a scene or courtesan from the Yoshiwara licensed pleasure quarter. The Hour of the Dragon, corresponding roughly to seven to nine in the morning, would in the quarter's daily rhythm mark the period of waking and morning toilette after the previous night's entertainment; the courtesan pictured in this sheet is rendered in the kimono and elaborate hair ornaments of a senior Yoshiwara oiran. The Yoshiwara-clock formula was an established bijin-ga template, used by Kunisada and other Utagawa designers across the late-Edo period; Kuniaki II's 1861 series demonstrates his command of the formula in the closing years of the Tokugawa government, when the Yoshiwara quarter remained the dominant subject of urban bijin imagery before the Meiji modernization recast both the quarter and the iconography that surrounded it.