Yaegaki-hime, from Bunraku Doll Print Collection (Bunraku ningyō hanga-shū)

Yaegaki-hime, the princess of the Takeda house in the puppet play Honchō nijūshikō (The Twenty-Four Examples of Filial Piety), is the most celebrated female role in the bunraku repertory and a touchstone of the carved kashira (puppet head) maker's art. Hasegawa Konobu IV's print, issued by Maria Shobō around 1955 as part of the ten-sheet Bunraku Doll Print Collection (Bunraku ningyō hanga-shū), isolates the puppet against a flat decorative ground so that the dignity of the carving and the elaborate kimono pattern can be read clearly. The image follows the iconography of the play's celebrated kabuto no dan (helmet) scene, in which Yaegaki-hime crosses the frozen Lake Suwa carrying her beloved Katsuyori's enchanted helmet, and the printer's treatment of the figure's heavy embroidered uchikake (outer robe) is rendered in saturated polychrome with attention to gold-thread highlights. The print belongs to a postwar documentary project that follows in the tradition Konobu IV's predecessor Sadanobu III had inaugurated in 1926–27 with his forty-eight-sheet Illustrated Collection of Famous Japanese Puppets of the Osaka Bunrakuza. Documented through the Japanese Art Open Database from the Robert O. Muller research files, the impression preserves the saturated postwar color register and crisp keyblock that distinguish well-pulled examples of the Maria Shobō set.