This book was part of a fashion for portraying living poets of humorous 'crazy verse' (kyoka). Fifty male and female poets are shown, one per page and each accompanied by a single representative poem. Wittily parodying the conventionalised portraits of poets of classic verse (waka) from the past. On the left side of one double page is the female kyoka poet Tamago no Kakujo, dressed in layered kimono and standing beside a folding screen with reed-blind panel inserts, holding her kitten on a lead. This is a visual parody of an incident in The Tale of Genji involving Genji's wife, the Third Princess and her small Chinese cat, which ran out through the blinds onto the veranda, chased by a larger cat, exposing her to Kashiwagi, a young noble with whom she then has an affair. On the right side of this double page is Hezutsu Tosaku, a poet from Edo seated with a kitten in his lap and gazing at the woman opposite. This too is an allusion to the relationship between Kashiwagi and the Third Princess, where Kashiwagi suffers remorse over the affair and acquires her cat as a surrogate.

Kitao Masanobu (1761-1816) was a painter, print artist and author. As an artist he used the name Kitao Masanobu, but as an author he would also use the name Santo Kyoden. A senior pupil of the founder of the Kitao school Kitao Shigemasa (1739-1820), Masanobu produced some single-sheet prints, and was one of the leading authors and illustrators of kibyoshi, ehon and kyoka anthologies.

For further reading, see the Rietberg Museum, Love, Fight, Feast: The Multifaceted World of Japanese Narrative Art, exhibition catalogue, (Zurich, 2021), entry to no. 69, go to:
https://rietberg.ch/files/ausstellungen/2021/LiebeKriegeFestlichkeiten/MuseumRietberg_NarrativeKunst_Handout_EN.pdf

Other known examples in museum collections:
Smithsonian, National Museum of Asian Art, Washington, (previously in The Gerhard Pulverer Collection), accession no. FSC-GR-780.331, go to:
https://asia.si.edu/object/FSC-GR-780.331/
The MET, New York, accession no. 2013.889, go to:
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/78779
The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, accession no. P.545-1943, go to:
https://data.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/id/image/media-188728
Harvard Art Museums/Arthur M. Sackler Museum, accession no. 1978.477.15, go to:
https://harvardartmuseums.org/art/199207