Narukami 4

Narukami is a kabuki play from the jūhachiban repertoire featuring the ascetic priest Narukami, who has imprisoned a dragon deity in a waterfall, causing drought across the land. A court lady seduces the priest, freeing the dragon and restoring rain. The title designation "4" places this kappazuri stencil print in a numbered series, suggesting multiple compositional or coloristic treatments of the Narukami subject within Takahashi Hiromitsu's work. The abstract categorization indicates the image does not reconstruct the theatrical scene literally but rather distills elements — possibly the dramatic confrontation, the priest's makeup, or the visual language of aragoto performance — into stencil-based graphic form. Kappazuri's layered, flat-color passages are consistent with abstracting kabuki visual codes into purely formal terms, a practice found among several postwar Japanese printmakers who drew on traditional theatrical imagery.