Mitsuuji with Mountain Roses (Yamabuki), from the series “Six Jewel Faces” (Mu tama-gao)

From the series "Six Jewel Faces (Mu tama-gao)," this 1834 design by Utagawa Kunisada features Mitsuuji - the Edo-period pop hero of the long-running illustrated novel "Nise Murasaki inaka Genji" (A Country Genji by a Fraudulent Murasaki) - paired with yamabuki (Japanese kerria, often translated as mountain rose). The Genji adaptation was one of the publishing sensations of the 1830s, and Kunisada designed the illustrations for the original book and a sprawling family of single-sheet prints riffing on its characters. Pairing Mitsuuji with seasonal flora was a staple device, turning each sheet into both a celebrity portrait and a flower-of-the-season image. The Metropolitan Museum of Art preserves the impression (accession 812250). The series exemplifies how Edo ukiyo-e thrived on cross-media licensing avant la lettre: a hit book generated prints, fashion plates, and parodic spinoffs across the print market. As Toyokuni III in later signatures, Kunisada was the central beneficiary of this Genji boom, and the Mu tama-gao series shows him weaving classical literary allusion into the stylish bijin-ga vocabulary that the townspeople audience expected.