Mitate

Mitate means expressing something not directly but by pointing to something else, so that the first is treated as the second. Japanese poems, haikai verse and kabuki have all used it. In gardens, the patterns raked into white sand and pebbles in a dry-landscape garden (karesansui) are treated as the flow of water. A rakugo storyteller conjures a scene with only a fan and a hand towel, for instance treating a closed fan as a pipe or chopsticks. A picture that tells a classical story or tale through figures and settings of the artist’s own day is called mitate-e, and it is common in ukiyo-e. Itō Jakuchū’s Vegetable Nirvana treats vegetables as the Buddha’s passing into nirvana.

Read the title and look at the shape, find the two things being compared, and think about where they match and where they differ.