Collection of Pictures of the Actors in the Four Theatres (Shiza yakusha ezukushi), vol. 2

Held in the Art Institute of Chicago, this woodblock-printed book is the second volume of the Shiza yakusha ezukushi (Collection of Pictures of the Actors in the Four Theatres), a multi-volume yakusha-e (actor-pictures) compendium documenting the kabuki performers of the four major Edo theaters of the Genroku era. The four-theater system that the book commemorates — the Nakamura-za, Ichimura-za, Morita-za, and Yamamura-za — constituted the licensed kabuki establishment of late seventeenth-century Edo, and the Shiza yakusha ezukushi is one of the foundational documents of the yakusha-e tradition that would become a central genre of ukiyo-e across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Moroshige's contribution to the project places him at the founding moment of actor-picture compilations, in which the printing trade began to systematically document and disseminate images of kabuki stars to the broader urban audience. The format of the woodblock-printed book — pages of densely composed actor portraits, often with name inscriptions identifying each figure and accompanying biographical or stylistic notes — established conventions of pose, costume, and visual identification that the entire subsequent yakusha-e tradition would inherit and elaborate. The Art Institute example documents Moroshige's command of the actor-picture genre at its formative moment and his role in transmitting the Hishikawa school's draftsmanship into a subject area that would prove enduringly central to ukiyo-e production.