Young woman under a willow tree

In this early pillar print (hashira-e) by Shunman, a beauty stands beneath the dangling branches of a willow, the trailing sleeves of her furisode patterned with meandering streams and asters. Through the narrow frame of the print we see her hold up a spray of flowers while shyly covering her mouth with one upraised sleeve.
How are we to read this picture? Is she simply a beauty enjoying nature on a warm spring day, or does her gesture signify something in particular? One possibility is that it alludes to a famous story about Ōta Dōkan, the celebrated warrior and poet credited with building Edo Castle in the seventeenth century. In this tale, Ōta stops by a house one day asking for the loan of a raincoat. The young woman who lives there offers him a flowering branch of kerria rose (yamabuki), but no raincoat. Angered by this response,Dōkan returns home, only to realize that the flowers were meant not as an insult, but as an elegant reference to a waka, or classical poem (see no. 33 for Harunobu’s rendition of this theme).