thought that after such a dog's burial their ghosts would not return to haunt the living, but it was customary to make their story into a song, which would become a nine days' pathos in Asakusa.
Not pathos but majesty is the dominating note of the Ukiyoye painters' homage to their Madonna. Easy to recognise by her distinctive garb—the tall coiffure transfixed with branching pins, the reversed sash with satchel-like bow in front, the high clogs of black lacquer—she is by far the most familiar figure to Western eyes through the medium of plebeian art. Cheap colour-prints disseminated her image from Boston to Paris; enthusiasts gave eager eye to her hieratic grace. Utamaro, who openly lived in Yoshiwara, which he served with purse and brush, was the first to win French homage through De Goncourt's advocacy for his stately mistresses of preternatural height. Daintier and more human, but not less divine, the monochromatic ladies of Moronobu, the green-and-rose ladies of Kiyonobu, the sirens beloved of Kiyonaga, of Toyokuni, of Kunisada, followed one another round the world, encircling it with a Circean spell. Banish their portraits from the collector's gallery, and you leave it bare of three or four of the greatest names on the roll of Tōkyō artists. On the other hand, you will more easily defend the Japanolater's thesis, that part of the superiority of Japanese over Occidental art lies in its contempt for the " eternal feminine."
It was Iyeyasu, the great organiser, who made it part of the State's business to centralise and control sporadic vice in the capital. Before his time the "social evil," as it is called, was free to spread its virus where it might, to the hurt of private and public weal.
