The sisters Matsukaze and Murasame on the shores of Suma

The sisters Matsukaze and Murasame on the shores of Suma, listed by the Art Institute of Chicago with a date of 1785, takes up a beloved classical subject already familiar to Edo viewers from no theatre and waka poetry. Matsukaze and Murasame are the two saltmaker sisters of Suma Bay who, in the play that bears their names, mourn the exiled courtier Ariwara no Yukihira; their story became a stock reference point for evocations of longing, the sea coast, and feminine grief. Utagawa Toyokuni handles the theme in the manner typical of Edo [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e) mitate, dressing the sisters in contemporary kimono and placing them in poses that contemporary viewers could read both as classical reference and as fashionable bijin imagery. The seascape behind them, with its low horizon and indication of pines, signals Suma without overwhelming the figures. The print thus performs the double work that Edo ukiyo-e excelled at: bringing classical narrative into the visual language of the urban present and giving it the immediacy of woodblock impression. Although Toyokuni is best known for [yakusha-e](/glossary/yakusha-e), his engagement with no and kabuki narratives across genre, history, and theatre shows how thoroughly his work was rooted in the wider literary culture of the period. The Art Institute of Chicago records the design as a Toyokuni I composition, preserving it as an example of the artist's classical literacy and of the mitate strategies that helped to keep older stories alive in everyday Edo image-making.