The Actor Ichikawa Yaozo II in a pre-performance celebration of the play "Soga Monogatari," performed at the Morita Theater in the second month, 1773

This Ippitsusai Buncho [hosoban](/glossary/hosoban) print, in the Art Institute of Chicago, shows the Edo kabuki actor Ichikawa Yaozo II in a pre-performance celebration for the play Soga Monogatari, performed at the Morita Theater in the second month of 1773. Pre-performance celebrations were public events at which leading actors and theater personnel marked the opening of a new production with formal greetings and ceremonial poses, and they generated their own visual record in Edo [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e) alongside the role portraits drawn from the play itself. The Soga material that lay behind Soga Monogatari was, by 1773, a centuries-old narrative cycle endlessly reworked for the Edo stage, and the second-month timing of this production aligned with the spring season when Soga plays were customarily staged. Buncho's design uses the slim vertical hosoban sheet to set the actor in formal dress, the inscriptions identifying actor, occasion, theater, and date. The work sits late in Buncho's recorded output, by which point his [yakusha-e](/glossary/yakusha-e) or kabuki actor prints had decisively shaped the way Edo audiences saw their leading performers documented on paper. The Art Institute of Chicago's impression preserves both the design and the inscribed information, contributing to the long-running scholarly project of reconstructing the precise sequence of mid-Edo kabuki productions.