Flower of Akashi (Akashi no hana)

Flower of Akashi (Akashi no hana) is a woodblock print by Utagawa Kuniteru dated 1853 and now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (accession JP1093.8). The title evokes the Akashi chapter of the Tale of Genji, one of the most lyrical sections of Murasaki Shikibu's eleventh-century romance, in which the exiled Genji forms an attachment to the daughter of a coastal nobleman at Akashi on the Inland Sea. By the mid-nineteenth century the Akashi chapter and its associations with coastal beauty, music, and tragic romance had become a standard subject for ukiyo-e designers working in the bijin-ga (beautiful women) tradition. Kuniteru's print, executed in the Kunisada-school manner of slender vertical figures with elaborate hairstyles and richly patterned robes, would have read for its 1853 Edo audience as both a portrait of a contemporary courtesan or actor and as a literary reference to the classical Genji material. The 1853 date places this print firmly in the active career of Kuniteru I (1808-1876), the Utagawa pupil of Kunisada I; it predates the documented working years of Kuniteru II. The Met has digitized the print under its Open Access program, and the artist's signature follows the conventional Utagawa pattern for the period.