In this painting, two women are fulling, that is, softening newly woven cloth by pounding and rinsing it. One holds a wooden mallet in her hand, while the other dips the fabric in a stream. The painting is one of a group depicting the popular motif of six famous rivers, all called Crystal River—Tamagawa—but differentiated by their location in six Japanese prefectures.

The painting relates to a poem by Minamoto Shunrai, titled “Crystal River at Kinuta,” which in turn refers to an earlier poem, “Autumn,” by the Tang-dynasty poet Li Bo. Li describes the sounds of women fulling cloth long into the night, as they await the return of their husbands from battling the Tartars in the north.

Though the artist and his clients knew this poem, Shunman’s primary interest is the depiction of beautiful women, and his paintings of the courtesans from the pleasure quarters of the capital city of Edo were extremely popular. His delicacy of line, intricacy of pattern, and sinuous elegance of form invoke ethereal beauty, steadfast against time.

A moon rises over Ch’ang-an,
From ten thousand doors comes the sound of pounding cloth.
The autumn wind blows sadly. . . .
—Li Bo, from “Autumn,” 8th century