New Year’s Day in the Yoshiwara

It is New Year’s Day at an exclusive brothel in the Yoshiwara. The courtesans are decked out in color-coordinated finery in a multitiered panorama of animated vignettes. The kitchen staff are stoking the ovens for the banquet to come. Some eighty people are talking, twisting around, opening presents, calling down from the balcony. The proprietor of the house in sheet four is having his fortune read, rather blasé about the prospects. A girl next to him is avidly reading a new novel that has arrived as a gift. A very young courtesan in the upper left of sheet three is so anxious to make up in the mirror under the tutelage of an elder that she has upturned her sandal in her haste to enter the room. This Hokusai’s sole ukiyo-e pentaptych and a spectacle.
To proceed from right to left in the Japanese manner, a man, holding an umbrella, and a woman with their backs to us are greeting a courtesan, half obscured by the pillar inscribed with a fire warning, and her attendant who have just walked through the green curtain over the doorway. A manservant taking a tea break on the edge of the floor platform has turned to look. Just left is the first group of courtesans: a twenty-year-old full-rank courtesan with billowing black and white obi, her two teenage assistants in matching outfits and a third attendant who has noticed something to their right. Opposite them a manservant is talking with a courtesan leaning on the post. A child attendant watches another girl make a rectangle with her fingers at a cook as he gestures back behind his sleeve.
At first glance, the peacock mural in the back hall of sheet two seems a clue to the actual setting. The traditional association of the pentaptych with the Ogiya brothel might have to do with reading the peacock here for a phoenix panel shown in earlier ukiyo-e, notably a book illustration of an artist painting a phoenix mural in Yoshiwara Picture Book: Annual Events by Kitagawa Utamaro (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 2011.806) and a titled triptych by Chokosai Eisho (act. 1780–1800) of three courtesans on display before a phoenix panel at the Chojiya house (The Art Institute of Chicago, 1925.2343). The “eyes” on the feathers in Hokusai’s print distinguish it as a peacock, leaving the question open as to whether this was artistic license or a feature of a different establishment. In any case, there is no basis for assuming that Hokusai visited a real place, despite the level of activity and detail that argue that he did.
What is unmistakable is the footprint of the pentaptych’s publisher, Iseya Rihei (firm name Kinjudo). He gives his name and Edo address in Shitaya, Ikenohata, Naka-cho in the right cartouche in sheet one. He emblazons his emblem on the wrapped casks of sake in sheet five next to his name “I” “se” “ri” and proclaims on the cask below, “Fashionable new print in five panels.” It is amusing to find all the spots the publisher has had his mark inserted into the design: the green aprons of the cooks and green wrapping cloth in sheet one; the green robe of a maid struggling with a stack of lacquer trays in sheet two. After great success releasing actor prints by Toyokuni in the 1780s and beauty prints by Utamaro in the 1790s, Iseya tapped Hokusai, by then an established artist in his thirties. A joint venture of Iseya and Hokusai of around 1801, The Storehouse of Loyal Retainers, a Primer (Kanadehon Chushingura) has the same purple-rose-yellow palette and a similar method of using architectural elements to vary the action and the scene. Another Iseya/Hokusai Chushingura series of “perspective pictures” (uki-e) of around 1800 has affinities with the Western perspective elements Hokusai employs here, in addition to the traditional Japanese technique of removing the roof to allow us into the scene and the black Chinese-style archway into the peacock hallway.
Iseya Rihei and Hokusai stopped collaborating by most accounts in the late 1810s. The pentaptych has been dated variously from 1804 to 1811 on the strength of this curtailed partnership, the style of the artist’s signature and Hokusai’s decision to turn away from beauty prints in favor of intensified painting commissions and landscapes. The additional censor’s seal Mori Ji to the left of the smaller, round censor’s seal kiwame (certified) was used by Moriya Jihei to censor prints in 1811 and possibly other years. Yet, there is an additional detail that might signify a different date: a small wooden plaque painted with a rooster leans against a wood cask above the oven––a casual signal, perhaps, that this pageant celebrates the beginning of the lunar Year of the Rooster, which for Iseya and Rihei took place in Bunka 10, or 1813.