Version of Legend of Michizane: Woman Riding Ox Which a Man is Leading

A [surimono](/glossary/surimono) treating a version of the legend of Sugawara no Michizane, the ninth-century scholar-statesman who was exiled to Kyushu and posthumously deified as the patron of learning. The image of a woman riding an ox led by a man here transposes elements of the Michizane story into a mitate or parody frame, an extremely common operation in surimono, where classical or historical subjects were routinely repurposed for the literary circles that commissioned the prints. Without further context about the specific verse that originally accompanied the sheet, the precise nature of the parody is difficult to recover, but the surimono format and the Michizane reference both signal a learned, literary audience. The Metropolitan Museum of Art holds the impression.