Asakusa Ricefields and Torinomachi Festival, No. 101

The full title of this adorable woodcut is "Asakusa Ricefields and Torinomachi Festival, No. 101 from One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, 11th month of 1857." Hiroshige here presents the Yoshiwara district on the single busiest day of the year. Yoshiwara was a famous yūkaku (red-light district) in Edo (present-day Tōkyō), Japan. In the woodcut we see a cat, sitting at the window of the brothel. In the distance, crossing the Asakusa Ricefields, is a procession celebrating the Torinomachi Festival. On this day, the Yoshiwara was open to everyone, including ordinary women. It was also a monbi, one of the special days on which each courtesan was required by tradition to take a customer—or to pay the fee to the brothel owner if she failed. Casually arranged in the foreground are a courtesan's accouterments. Peeping out from behind the border of a screen are tissue papers delicately known as "paper for the honorable act."

P.S. Luckily women were not only courtesans in the Edo period. Here is an uplifting story of Kiyohara Yukinobu, a female painter of the Kano School.