Fortune Teller

This design from Wada Sanzo's Showa Shokugyo Emaki records the ekisha, the street fortune teller who reads using the divination sticks (zeichiku) and bound oracle texts of the I Ching tradition. The composition typically isolates the practitioner at a small folding table beneath a paper lantern bearing the character for divination (uranai), with a client seated opposite or implied just outside the frame. Wada handles the figure with the calm frontality common to his occupational portraits, using firm contour and flat colour planes rather than dramatic chiaroscuro, and reserving any bokashi gradation for the dusk or lamplit atmosphere of the night-stall setting. The mokuhanga impression on washi gives the divination implements — the fan of bamboo sticks, the worn book, the ink brush — the same documentary specificity as the carpenter's plane or the fishmonger's knife elsewhere in the series. The print places an ancient practice firmly within Showa modernity, treating the sidewalk fortune teller as one continuous occupation among many, deserving the same observational attention as the trades of the new economy.