Listening to the first cuckoo on a late spring outing

The hototogisu, or cuckoo, was traditionally considered a harbinger of summer. At the start of the fifth month, as the weather warmed up, fashionable Edoites would venture to locations attractive to the bird: Hakusan in Koishikawa, Negishi, Surugadai, Nezu, and the Sumida River. Here a group is gathered at the edge of a pond where irises and a budding willow mark the season. A girl in an elegant furisode and brocade obi lowers her parasol as she catches sight of a hototogisu, while on a bench nearby, an attractive couple in stylish attire relaxes, chatting and smoking, seemingly uninterested in bird watching. Ignored by all, a boy dances about in excitement, having spotted a large frog or toad on the landing.
Kitao Masanobu was the sobriquet of a printmaker and illustrator who trained under Kitao Shigemasa (see no. 67). Later in his career he assumed the pen name Santō Kyōden, writing the light fiction that made him a taste-maker among fashionable habitués of the Edo pleasure quarters. This large ōbaiban, or double ōban print, exists in only two other copies; one in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston the other formerly in the Vever collection (present whereabouts unknown). Popular in the 1780s, the ōbaiban size was also the format used by Masanobu for a sumptuous album, New Beauties of the Yoshiwara in the Mirror of Their Own Script (Yoshiwara keisei shin bijin awase jihitsu kagami).