People Born in Earth Signs Will Be Lucky on the Eighth Day of the Fifth Month

This 1858 woodblock print by Utagawa Kunisato, held by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (accession MFA sc138834), depicts a topical lucky-day composition titled People Born in Earth Signs Will Be Lucky on the Eighth Day of the Fifth Month. The subject draws on the popular almanac and fortune-telling tradition that was a substantial component of mid-nineteenth-century Edo commercial print production, providing buyers with images keyed to specific zodiac signs, lucky days, festival dates, and seasonal observances that guided household decision-making in late-Edo Japan. The fifth-month date of the print places the auspicious moment around the Tango no Sekku boys'-day festival period, one of the major calendrical observances of the Edo year, and the earth-sign reference ties the composition to the broader twelve-animals zodiac that organized Edo popular cosmology. Kunisato's design belongs to the documentary-topical commercial genre that he worked across the late 1850s alongside his theatrical, warrior, festival, and genre subjects, and the 1858 dating ties it specifically to the closing two-year window of his active career. The print is preserved at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where it forms part of the museum's substantial Kunisato holdings and is accessible through the open-access digital program that has made the MFA's Japanese print collection one of the major publicly available archives for nineteenth-century Edo print study.