Two Women Reading

Two Women Reading, a [surimono](/glossary/surimono) of around 1820 by Yashima Gakutei in the Art Institute of Chicago, takes one of the most quietly modern subjects in late-Edo print culture and refits it for kyoka-e. By the early nineteenth century, women in the merchant and samurai households of Edo and Osaka had access to a wide range of books, from popular fiction to poetry anthologies, and images of women absorbed in reading had begun to appear in commercial [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e). In the surimono format, where prints were privately commissioned by poetry circles, the subject became reflexive: a print depicting reading, paired with printed kyoka verses, asked its viewers to think about their own engagement with text. Working within the Hokusai school as a student of Katsushika Hokusai, Yashima Gakutei composes the two figures with the supple, slightly angular line that characterizes his [bijin-ga](/glossary/bijin-ga). He uses areas of blank paper and a restrained palette to let the patterned kimono and the open book stand out, and the print's surface combines mineral pigments with the [karazuri](/glossary/karazuri) embossing and burnished metallic accents typical of deluxe surimono. The result is an unusually intimate image: domestic in subject, literary in implication, and made for an audience that read everything in the picture, from the brushed line to the embossed details, as part of a single composed gesture. As a Yashima Gakutei surimono in the Hokusai school manner, the print stands at the meeting point of bijin-ga and kyoka-e.