Reaching for Shuttlecock in New Year's Game

Utagawa Toyokuni I's "Reaching for Shuttlecock in New Year's Game" captures the seasonal pastime of hanetsuki, the New Year's badminton-like game in which young women paddle a feathered shuttlecock across a sunlit yard or street. The print, documented on [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e).org, exemplifies how Edo ukiyo-e attended to the calendar of urban play with the same care it gave to the calendar of kabuki performances. Although Utagawa Toyokuni is best known for kabuki actor prints — [yakusha-e](/glossary/yakusha-e) in which the Utagawa school dominated for a generation — his bijinga and seasonal scenes form a coherent strand of his oeuvre. Hanetsuki provided artists with a useful pretext: the raised arm of the player extends a sleeve to its full pictorial length, the tilt of the head pulls the eye, and the small shuttlecock floats as a punctuating accent. Toyokuni stages such moments with the figural confidence honed in yakusha-e but recast in a lighter register. The print would have circulated as a New Year's image in Edo, joining the broader genre of e-goyomi and other seasonal designs that decorated households for the first month. For collectors and students working from the ukiyo-e.org archive, the sheet illustrates the breadth of Utagawa Toyokuni I's output beyond kabuki actor prints, while still bearing his recognizable hand in the rhythm of the figure and the spare framing of the composition.