Courtier and Lady with a Young Woman Poling a Boat

This scene evokes the famous scene from Chapter 51, “A Boat Cast Away” (Ukifune), of the The Tale of Genji. The setting is the New Year, the beginning of spring in the lunar calendar, when the plum trees are about to burst into bloom, the warbler is poised to sing its first song (hatsune) of the year, and pine saplings—ready to be plucked—for the Ne no hi (First Day of the Rat) ceremony adorn the shores of a winding stream.

At a tumultuous point in her life Ukifune finds herself falling in love with competing suitors, Kaoru and Niou. The far-and-away most commonly depicted scene set a bit later in spring after a heavy snowfall when the moon is in the morning sky and Niou joins Ukifune for boat ride on the Uji river to the Isle of Oranges (Tachibana no kojima) accompanied, according to the tale, by her maid and a boatman. In most depictions, however, the maid and boatman are omitted from the scene to focus on the lovers. Here a young maiden with flowing hair poles the boat.

The kyōka (witty thirty-one-syllable poems) accompanying the illustration are not connected to The Tale of Genji in any way whatsoever, but are rather generic New Year’s greetings, and a surimono (privately commissioned print) like this would have circulated among members of a literary salon. Yet, even though the poems have no explicit references the Tale, the setting of the Ukifune chapter at the New Year, the beginning of spring, allows the poetic associations and imagery to provide the setting for a New Year’s greeting card. One phrase in the middle of the third poem from the right includes the phrase “niou ume ga ka,” “the scent the plum is fragrant . . . ,” but just that little reference was enough to trigger associations in the artist’s imagination with a scene of “fragrant” plum blossoms, not to mention the obvious coincidence that niou (to be fragrant) is a homonym for Niou, the courtier wooing Ukifune. The artist-poet Kubo Shunman (1757–1820) was clever at illustrating and animating such references. He was well versed in the classics and created various surimono series based on the classics such as the Tosa Diary (Tosa nikki) and Tales of Ise (Ise monogatari), among others. The head of the Bakurō poetry group, Hajintei (Tsumuri no) Hikari (1754–1796), whose poem is on the far left, the place of honor, was on close terms with Shunman, who was a skilled poet as well, and would have negotiated with the artist over the design and fee