Mitsuuji in the Maruyama Pleasure District of Nagasaki (Nagasaki dejima)

Mitsuuji in the Maruyama Pleasure District of Nagasaki (Nagasaki dejima), designed in 1861 and held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is a late Edo ukiyo-e by Utagawa Kunisada from his long-running Genji-themed series. Mitsuuji is the Edo-period stand-in for Hikaru Genji, the protagonist of Ryutei Tanehiko's wildly popular 1829-42 serialized novel Nise Murasaki inaka Genji (A Country Genji by a Fake Murasaki), which transposed the Heian court romance into a contemporary feudal setting. Kunisada's serial collaboration with Tanehiko - first through the novel's woodblock illustrations and then through the spinoff print series that flowed for decades after - became one of the most lucrative properties in Edo publishing. Here Mitsuuji visits Maruyama, the licensed pleasure quarter of Nagasaki adjacent to the Dejima trading post, the only port through which foreign goods entered Japan during the Tokugawa period. Kunisada uses the setting to insert exotic detail: Dutch-style shipping lanterns, Chinese-influenced architecture, and patterns suggesting imported textiles, all framed within his characteristic compressed bijinga composition. The figures' faces, with their long noses and slender eyes, exemplify the late-period Toyokuni III bijin formula, and the saturated indigo, vermilion, and aniline-tinged purples mark the print as a Bunkyu era production. The image sits at the intersection of yakusha-e portraiture and bijinga, with topographic interest in Nagasaki, and reflects the curiosity about the outside world that Edo audiences felt as the bakufu's policy of isolation drew to a close.