Yasuki-Bushi (Ballad) Dancer

Yasuki-Bushi (Ballad) Dancer (安来節の女) is a 34 × 45.4 cm oil on canvas painted by Hasegawa Toshiyuki in 1935. The sitter is a female performer of Yasuki-bushi, a folk song-and-dance form originating in Yasuki in Shimane Prefecture that had become enormously popular in the Tokyo music halls of the 1920s and 1930s — Asakusa in particular, where the Yasuki-bushi performers in their distinctive comic head-coverings and aprons (the dojō-sukui or "loach-scooping" dance) were a fixture of the variety theater. Hasegawa shows her at the moment of performance, the figure summarized in rapid strokes of red, ochre, and viridian, with the dark mass of her head and the bright accents of her costume played against a heavily worked ground. The painting belongs to the long sequence of Asakusa entertainment subjects — café waitresses, music-hall performers, bar mistresses, street figures — that occupied Hasegawa from the early 1930s onward and that constitutes one of the most important visual records of pre-war Asakusa popular culture. The work was reproduced in the 1963 Kodansha Complete Collection of Modern Japanese Painting and remains in a private collection.