Komurasaki of the Kadotamaya with Attendants Hatsune and Shirabe c. 1791

This is a woodblock print by Chōbunsai Eishi, made in Japan in the late 18th or early 19th century. It depicts Komurasaki, a celebrated courtesan, accompanied by her young attendants. Prints like this were aimed at a middle-class urban audience with money to spend. They could buy an image of a celebrity from the pleasure district, a way of vicariously participating in that world. In a society with rigid class hierarchies, art like this allowed some negotiation of social norms and offered an imagined view of a more fluid social world. Woodblock prints were not part of the elite art establishment, but instead were produced and consumed by a wider population. If you want to understand how these images worked within Japanese society, think about looking at popular literature, theater reviews, or even maps of the city, to understand how the pleasure districts were viewed by the wider culture.