Sadakurō, from Bunraku Doll Print Collection

Sadakurō is the villainous masterless samurai of the puppet play Kanadehon Chūshingura (The Treasury of Loyal Retainers), the most famous and frequently performed work in the bunraku and kabuki repertories. Hasegawa Konobu IV's print, from the Bunraku Doll Print Collection published by Maria Shobō in the mid-1950s, depicts the character at his iconographically distinctive moment in act five of the play, when the rain-soaked Sadakurō murders the elderly Yoichibei and steals the purse that will set the play's tragic chain of consequence in motion. The kashira of the role is one of the great character carvings in the bunraku repertory: the akuyaku (villain) head with its drawn brows and slightly contorted mouth, here presented in the conventional storm-soaked black kimono with the costume's patterns rendered in restrained sumi against a flat ground. Konobu IV's treatment follows the documentary conventions of the series, isolating the figure for individual appreciation as both stage character and carved puppet head. The print is recorded in the Japanese Art Open Database from the Robert O. Muller research files, and it documents the postwar Bunrakuza repertory at the moment of the Japanese state's 1955 designation of bunraku as an Important Intangible Cultural Property.