Suzuki Harunobu's prints depict the lives of courtesans living in legalized pleasure districts. Courtesans were sex workers who also sold their skills as artists and poets. In Love at the Brothel Gate, a woman speaks to her lover, a fellow entertainer, through a gated wall. During the Edo period, sex workers were confined to their working neighborhoods and some were kept in their brothels. The pleasure districts were walled off from the rest of major cities, reinforcing the separation. A poem hangs above the scene in this ukiyo-e print, narrating the confined woman's hidden wants and desires as a captive of the "floating world."

Courtesans were on display to potential clients through bars, an aspect of their jobs that also afforded an opportunity to have socially distanced interactions with fellow entertainment district denizens. Here, a courtesan with a crane motif on her obi sash converses with her lover, a young man carrying a miniature theater. The poem in the cloud above them comes from New Collection of Poems Ancient and Modern (新古今和歌集) and reads,

Although I yearn,
I do not speak as days and months,
pass by behind my cedar gate.
How can I endure keeping this secret within?