Rustic Genji's Poetry Contest: Mitsuuji's Excursion to the Seaside to See Abalone Diving

A color woodblock print of 1865 in the Cleveland Museum of Art (accession 1940.1017), this is one panel of a [triptych](/glossary/triptych) signed 'Kunisada II fude' ('drawn by Kunisada II'), confirming the artist's identity in the first full year of his tenure under the senior name. The subject belongs to the Rustic Genji (Inaka Genji) franchise: Ryūtei Tanehiko's serialized parody novel Nise Murasaki inaka Genji, which transposed the eleventh-century Tale of Genji into the late-Muromachi persons of a dashing hero named Mitsuuji, had been a runaway bestseller of the 1830s, and the prints derived from it — first by Kunisada I, then continued by Kunisada II — sustained one of the longest-running franchises in the late-Edo print market. Here Mitsuuji travels to the coast to observe ama (female abalone divers), a tableau that allowed the artist to combine the protagonist's elegance with the famous picturesque subject of half-clad divers wading from the water. The Cleveland triptych is among the most complete examples of Kunisada II's mature mid-1860s Genji output.