Page 125 - 2021 March 16th Japanese and Korean Art, Christie's New York City

In Parody of Asazuma Boat, Hokusai is working in the impromptu ink and light colors
mode that he sometimes painted at small literary gatherings in restaurants. As is typical
for such works, privately commissioned by Edo literati steeped in the lore of the Floating
World, the subject is more complex than appears at first glance. A Yoshiwara courtesan
is seated on three quilts, the multiple layers of bedding that mark her high status within
the brothel. Her pillow, wrapped in paper, is set on the traditional lacquered wood stand.
Beside her, a branch of spring willow emerges from a bamboo flower container on a
post, suggesting an interior setting.

The inscription, by the poet-calligrapher Ota Nanpo (1749-1823), here styling himself
Shokusanjin, is a humorous song written in the voice of the prostitute. John T. Carpenter
translated it as follows in his Hokusai and his Age (Amsterdam: Hotei, 2005):

As one of the men who comes and goes,
on quickly cresting waves of fickleness,
you scribbled a poem on my paper pillowcase,
dipping the brush into the pool of the inkstone
that flows from the [ever-changing] Asuka River. (instrumental interlude)
While yesterday at the bed chambers
of the Okamoto House, there was a popular client,
And though it was not the goose
[of ancient Chinese legend that someone traded for calligraphy by Wang
Xizhi],
we, the older and younger sister courtesans, exchanged with him
the scroll for a little bird appropriately called jushimatsu[ten sisters].

This ditty was composed when the courtesan Asazuma received a
pet bird called a jushimatsuin exchange for a scroll of calligraphy
that had been brushed for her.

Nanpo recorded this incident—the courtesan who gave back his calligraphy in exchange
for a small bird—in his diary in 1803. Soon after that, presumably around 1804, Nanpo
repeated the inscription on this painting of Asazuma by Hokusai. Hokusai began using
the combination of signature and seal seen here in 1803.
As for the image of the young courtesan seated on quilts beside a branch of willow, it
would have been understood by Hokusai’s audience as a parody of the boat prostitute
Asazuma, a theme popularized by the artist-rebel Hanabusa Itcho (1652-1724) in the
early eighteenth century and then widely circulated in a woodblock-printed version of
1770. Itcho showed a boat prostitute of the port of Asazuma on Lake Biwa, seated in
profile and facing left, with a willow tree prominent on the shore behind her; his image
was thought to be a subversive reference to the shogun’s concubine and may have
been the cause of his exile—a delicious whiff of scandal.