Poem by Fujiwara Michinobu Ason: Oyone and Taheiji

Poem by Fujiwara Michinobu Ason: Oyone and Taheiji, an 1845 Edo ukiyo-e by Utagawa Kunisada in the Victoria and Albert Museum, belongs to his Hyakunin Isshu series pairing classical Hyakunin Isshu poems with contemporary scenes from the popular Edo stage. Fujiwara Michinobu's famous waka, lamenting the dawn after a night spent with a lover, supplies the literary frame, while Oyone and Taheiji - the doomed couple from the joruri and kabuki play Komochi Yamamba and its derivatives - provide the contemporary kabuki referent. Kunisada's mitate device flatters both the poem and the audience, linking the elite Heian poetic anthology with the Edo theater's most beloved tragic-romantic couples. The composition places Oyone and Taheiji as two figures in close embrace or near-embrace, dressed in patterned robes whose textile detail Kunisada rendered as carefully as the actors' faces. The cartouche above carries the poem and the poet's identification. As Toyokuni III, working with the Tempo-era Edo publishers, Kunisada repeatedly produced mitate Hyakunin Isshu prints that fused the literary canon with kabuki, and the series became one of the most copied and reissued of his later career. The V&A's impression preserves the heavy printing and saturated reds, indigos, and yellows that characterize his mid-1840s Koka-era output. The print is a useful single-sheet example of how mitate functioned in nineteenth-century Edo ukiyo-e as a bridge between literary heritage and contemporary entertainment.