Zashiki Hakkei

The prints are mitate-e parodies of popular themes of the 11th-century Chinese landscape painting series, Eight Views of Xiaoxiang; Harunobu replaces natural scenery with domestic scenes.

[4] Suzuki Harunobu (1725–1770) achieved fame in the latter 1760s for his pioneering nishiki-e "brocade prints" made with a large number of coloured blocks.

[12] Harunobu often employed numerous complex mitate allusions in his prints for viewers to take pleasure in recognizing and deciphering.

[15] Kyosen and Harunobu were almost certainly familiar with their work, and the poems on the Fūryū Zashiki Hakkei prints bear a close resemblance to Kichijirō's.

[18] The art scholar Monta Hayakawa [ja] considers Fūryū Zashiki Hakkei likely the most complex set of shunga prints.

[35] With the exception of Clearing Mist of the Fan, the prints depict indoor scenes set in a zashiki [ja]—a Japanese-style room floored with tatami straw mats.

Two women feature in each print of Zashiki Hakkei, and each is a mitate parody that alludes to the Eight Views of Xiaoxiang series, replacing the landscape scenery of the paintings with contemporary domestic scenes and objects.

[39] The scene depicts a young girl from a privileged family practising the koto,[40] an instrument with movable bridges for each of its 13 strings.

[42] Contemporary viewers of the print would have been familiar with the piece and its third verse:[44] The Fūryū Zashiki Hakkei version, titled 琴柱落雁, was the first in the series, which is thus perhaps why it is quieter and less explicit than the rest.

[49] The changing colours of the leaves outside the window suggest indicate autumn, the season of migrating geese of Kotoji no rakugan, a version of which appears on a partitioning screen behind the pair.

Further allusions include those relating to the koto, as in the original version of the print,[47] and the painting of a skein of geese on the partitioning screen at right behind the boy.

[52] Hayakawa finds mitate allusions in the poem that relate to the image: he sees the "first geese" signifying the boy's first love, and the sound of the koto—an instrument that most often young women learn—representing the awakening of the girl's romantic feelings.

[16] The print's embossing gives the feeling of the softness of the silk floss detail, a technique called karazuri (空摺り) that uses an un-inked woodblock.

[58] The erotic Fūryū Zashiki Hakkei version is of a cotton worker having sex with a clerk who has come to collect goods.

The clerk's account book lies behind him to the right, and the print employs the same nurioke allusion to the mountains of River and Sky in Evening Snow.

[59] Outside the shōji in the background appear the head and forelegs of a white dog whose arched posture suggest a female in mid-copulation.

[60] Harunobu appears to have appropriated the positioning and gestures of the copulating figures from the ninth page of Sukenobu's Nure-sugata Aizomekawa[v] of 1722 for the Fūryū Zashiki Hakkei.

[63] In the Fūryū Zashiki Hakkei version a female servant peeps from behind a fusuma sliding door at a man and woman having sex, a common theme in Harunobu's shunga prints as typified in his Maneemon series.

[64] The composition and the poem about "becoming extremely lonely" draws attention to the servant, rather than the copulating couple as would be expected in an erotic print.

The copulating pair share the positioning of a couple in the final volume of Sukenobu's Furyū Iro Hakkei[w] of 1715, and Harunobu appears to have appropriated the peeping servant from the anonymous Nanshoku Yamaji no Tsuyu[x] of c. 1733.

[37] The print depicts a hairdresser doing up the hair of a young girl in a long-sleeved kimono with a pattern of plovers flying over waves, which perhaps alludes to the surface of Dongting Lake.

[70] In the Fūryū Zashiki Hakkei version a husband, smoking a pipe, embraces his half-naked wife from behind, pulls at her kimono,[65] and fondles her genitals[70] as she applies makeup.

[13] To Hayakawa, the woman's body partly covered by the kimono is an allusion to the accompanying poem's "mid-autumn full moon ... hidden in the clouds".

Hayakawa identifies the mitate with setting sun of The Fishing Village in the Evening Glow as the waning passion of the husband for his wife during her pregnancy.

[29][78] In the Fūryū Zashiki Hakkei version a man has forcible sex with a woman holding a piece of kaishi paper used in the tea ceremony.

Beside it the mistress of the house is using a bucket meant for washing the hands and face; her kimono is patterned with riverside threeleaf arrowheads, a plant associated with summer.

[81] A Japanese rock garden lies outside in the background of the Fūryū Zashiki Hakkei version, in which a middle-aged man has his beard plucked by a young woman.

[83] Harunobu appears to have appropriated background and the positioning of the copulating figures from the final volume of Sukenobu's Nanshoku Yamaji no Tsuyu of c. 1733 for the Fūryū Zashiki Hakkei.

This includes details such as the reflection of the couple's faces in a round mirror and a garden in the background with stepping stones and a bamboo gate.

[36] Isoda Koryūsai produced two series in the early 1770s titled Fūryū Zashiki Hakkei—one chūban-sized, the other hashira-e pillar prints—but he does not appear to have based them directly on Harunobu's.