# Parody of a scene from The Tale of Genji - By: Kawamata Tsuneyuki 川又常行 (1676?-1741?) - Date: early 18th century - Medium: Ink, color, and gold on paper - Classification: Paintings - Dimensions: H x W (image): 53.4 × 53.4 cm (21 × 21 in) - Culture: Japanese - Credit line: Gift of Charles Lang Freer - Museum: [Smithsonian Institution](https://asia.si.edu/object/F1898.118/) - Rights: [CC0 (Smithsonian Open Access)](https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) - Picture: https://invisiblenetwork.ai/thumbs/web/aeabdf27022798045dc774d5803a89b0.jpg - Who can see it: Little Ones profiles and older (museums give no ratings; placed by Invisible Network from the museum's own words) The Tale of Genji, written in the early eleventh century by Murasaki Shikibu, a woman of the imperial court, became widely known during the Edo period (1615-1868) through illustrated printed books. By the eighteenth century, when this painting was created, the conventional elements identifying famous episodes were recognizable, even without text. Here a scene from the thirty-fourth chapter of Genji is transformed into an unexpected contemporary context through a convention known as mitate (often translated as "parody"), a literary and pictorial device that employs an unexpected parallel or comparison between apparently unrelated images.