Meng Zong, one of the Twenty-four Paragons of Filial Piety

Dressed in a wide sedge hat and a straw cape, a beautiful woman prepares to dig a bamboo shoot out of the deep snow. Her bare feet and hands, holding a mattock, are pure white against her brilliantly colored furisode robe. The pattern on her robe is of undulating shorelines lined with bracken and threeleaf arrowhead, the first a symbol of spring and the second of summer.
Digging bamboo in the snow is standard iconography for the story of Meng Zong (Mōsō), one of the Chinese Twenty- four Paragons of Filial Piety (Nijūshikō). According to legend, Meng Zong’s sick mother asked him to find bamboo shoots to make a medicinal broth. He went out in the snowy winter to look, but to no avail. Then, amazingly, his prayers and tears seemed to produce bamboo shoots rising up from the frozen ground (see no. 11 for an earlier version, by Okumura Masanobu). The story was retold in Japan in various forms, including moral instruction. In this print, the undertones seem to be more erotic than pious. The imagery of protruding shoots makes this story an obvious candidate for a mitate reworking of the theme with a beautiful woman in place of Meng Zong.
As detailed in David Waterhouse’s essay (p. 21), this impression has been identified as the second state for a calendar print (egoyomi) for the year 1765. An earlier version had the numbers of the long months for that year hidden in the bamboo leaves. Because this version removes the dating, it was produced after 1765, probably the following year.