Comic Music (Manzaigaku), from the series Large Dolls

This 1856 woodblock print, titled "Comic Music (Manzaigaku), from the series (?) Large Dolls (Ō-ningyō no uchi)," is held by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (ukiyo-e.org accession sc144622, MFA object 253815). The composition depicts a manzai performance, the traditional New Year street comedy in which itinerant performers in distinctive costumes delivered comic dialogues and music door-to-door in the first days of the year, here transposed into the imagined world of large dolls. The cataloguing convention "from the series (?)" indicates that the MFA's identification of the series Ō-ningyō no uchi remains provisional, a reminder that much of the Yoshiharu corpus survives without complete series documentation. The print combines the genre of comic seasonal celebration with the visual language of doll culture, a recurring concern of Edo print designers responding to the elaborate doll displays of the Hinamatsuri and other seasonal festivals. It dates from the most productive years of Yoshiharu's career, just as his Utagawa-school output was at its peak, and is held in the Museum of Fine Arts Boston's collection of Japanese woodblock prints.