When a Cat Tells a Story

Hidden stories, #1

The secret references hidden inside Japanese woodblock prints

If you've ever admired a Japanese woodblock print, you may have wondered whether there was more to it than a beautiful landscape or an elegant portrait.

The answer is almost always - yes.

Imagine opening up a newspaper or a blog page today.

You don't need someone to explain a reference to a recent political event, Harry Potter or a famous meme. You simply recognise it.

Edo-period Japanese people looked at ukiyo-e prints in much the same way.

Their artists assumed viewers would recognise scenes from The Tale of Genji, classical poetry, Kabuki theatre, famous places and popular jokes. The prints weren't simply pictures to admire; they were full of visual references waiting to be recognised.

Two hundred years later, many of those clues have become almost invisible to us.

A cat playing with a curtain, a shell resting in the corner of an image, a particular pose taken by a courtesan - these weren't simply aesthetic choices. They were visual clues, pointing towards stories that almost everyone at the time would have known.

The Japanese even had a name for this kind of visual game: mitate-e. Rather than retelling a famous story outright, artists preferred to hint at it, weaving recognisable scenes into unexpected everyday settings. Spotting the reference—and enjoying the artist's cheeky twist—was part of the pleasure.

One of the richest sources of these hidden references was The Tale of Genji, the great eleventh-century novel by Murasaki Shikibu. Much as Shakespeare, Greek mythology or the Bible have influenced Western art for centuries, Genji provided artists with a shared visual language that their audience instantly understood.

The best way to understand mitate is to see it at work.

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A cat that changes everything

 

Kitagawa Utamaro — A Woman and a Cat (c.1793–94)

At first glance, this is simply an intimate domestic scene.

A young woman pauses while folding a length of delicate printed silk. Beside her, a mischievous cat has become fascinated by the fabric.

Cats appear frequently in ukiyo-e, but this playful scene carries an unexpected literary reference. The motif became so popular that it came to be known simply as Onna Sannomiya ("The Third Princess"), after one of the most memorable episodes in The Tale of Genji. In the novel, a cat accidentally pulls back a curtain, briefly revealing the secluded Third Princess to the nobleman Kashiwagi. That fleeting glimpse changes several lives, setting in motion one of the story's most tragic chapters.

The scene clearly captured artists' imaginations. Here are three very different ways they chose to tell the same story.

Utamaro never illustrates the novel directly.

Instead, he gently hints at it.

Here, the slipping robe, the translucent silk and the cat all invite viewers familiar with Genji to remember that famous episode. What appears playful also becomes romantic, alluring and slightly dangerous.

This is exactly the kind of subtle storytelling that Edo audiences enjoyed discovering.

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A snowy ferry—and a drifting princess

Utagawa Hiroshige — A Play on the Ukifune Chapter: Ferry on the Sumida River (1845)

Hiroshige's title gives the game away.

Rather than depicting the famous "Ukifune" chapter literally, he creates a playful visual comparison.

The beautifully dressed woman crossing the Sumida River echoes Ukifune, the young woman whose impossible love triangle leads her to throw herself from a boat into the river.

Nothing dramatic is happening here.

There is no rescue.

No desperate leap.

Only a graceful figure closing her umbrella against softly falling snow.

 

For viewers who recognised the literary reference, however, the emotional story was already present beneath the peaceful winter landscape.

Even the shell placed in the corner of the composition quietly alludes to Genji through the traditional shell-matching game kai-awase, closely associated with the novel.

Without knowing these references, we simply see a beautiful snow scene.

Knowing them transforms the print into something richer and far more personal.

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Looking beyond the obvious

Perhaps this is one of the greatest pleasures of Japanese art.

It rewards curiosity. The longer you look, the more it reveals.

Small details that seem decorative often turn out to be clues, jokes, literary references or visual quotations that Edo audiences would have recognised immediately.

Over the coming months, we'll be exploring more of these hidden stories—looking closely at individual prints, recurring symbols, seasonal motifs and the fascinating ways artists communicated with viewers through seemingly ordinary objects.

Sometimes, all it takes is a cat.

Inspired by the artworks in this story