Masaoka, from Bunraku Doll Print Collection

Masaoka is the loyal samurai wet-nurse who defends the boy-lord of the Date house in the puppet play Meiboku Sendai hagi (The Bush Clover of Sendai), one of the great oie-mono (great-house succession) dramas of the bunraku stage. Hasegawa Konobu IV's print, from the Bunraku Doll Print Collection issued by Uchida of Kyoto in the 1950s, depicts the role's central female figure — a wakashū-gata kashira of mature dignity, costumed in the patterned kimono of a senior samurai wet-nurse — in the dignified frontal pose conventional to the series. The composition isolates the puppet against a flat ground so that the carver's modeling of the kashira and the costume's distinctive Date-house textile patterns can be read separately. The play's climactic gohan no ba (boiled-rice scene), in which Masaoka must watch her own son die in place of the boy-lord she protects, is among the most emotionally demanding passages in the bunraku repertory, and the dignified frontal presentation of Konobu IV's print captures the role's central iconographic stillness. The impression is documented in the Japanese Art Open Database from the Robert O. Muller research files.