Two Young Women Playing a Game of Sugoroku

Two Young Women Playing a Game of Sugoroku is a [bijin-ga](/glossary/bijin-ga) print by Utagawa Toyokuni in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Sugoroku, a board game played with dice on a printed sheet, was widely enjoyed in Edo households and frequently appeared as a motif in genre painting and [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e). The game lent itself to scenes of leisure, especially during the New Year's season when sugoroku boards designed around themes from theater, travel, and famous places were exchanged as gifts. Toyokuni's composition focuses on two women seated together over the board, their bodies turned in the postures of attentive play. The patterned robes and the careful arrangement of fingers and dice express the elegance Toyokuni brought to his bijin-ga work, while the small interior detail of the board and counters anchors the scene in everyday life. As in many of his images of women, the print is concerned both with the figures' fashionable presentation and with the calm, focused quality of their shared activity, qualities prized by Edo viewers and collectors. The Met assigns the print the date 1769, taken here from the museum record. Together with Toyokuni's actor prints, scenes like this one helped fix in popular memory the leisured rhythms of Edo women's domestic life, contributing to the broader Edo ukiyo-e project of celebrating contemporary urban culture through woodblock images of modest but absorbing pleasures.