A surimono depicting a court lady on a veranda, looking out after a session of playing the shamisen.

The artist has chosen to emulate visual conventions of the Tosa school like the golden clouds and kidney-shaped heads. The Tosa school was known for producing courtly illuminated manuscripts of classical tales such as the Tale of Ise.

This work was privately commissioned as part of a diptych in celebration of the Lunar New Year of the Goat in 1835. Such prints were meant to be exchanged as year-end ritual gifts called seibo and would have likely circulated amongst the commissioner's friends and acquaintances. As surimono were privately commissioned, they were typically limited in production, with runs spanning a range of 50 to 200 impressions. This genre of woodblock printing also used costly materials and timely techniques such as bokashi (gradation) printing, blind printing (embossing), as well as the incorporation of metal pigments like brass leaf and silvery mica powder, all used in this work.