The Actor Iwai Hanshiro IV as Okaru in Act Seven of the Play Chushingura (Treasury of the Forty-seven Loyal Retainers), Performed at the Morita Theater from the Third Day of the Fourth Month, 1769

Ippitsusai Buncho's [yakusha-e](/glossary/yakusha-e) portrait of Iwai Hanshirō IV as Okaru in Act Seven of Chūshingura — the Treasury of the Forty-seven Loyal Retainers — commemorates a specific kabuki performance staged at the Morita Theater from the third day of the fourth month of 1769. The Art Institute of Chicago preserves the impression and supplies the play, role, act, theater, and date. Act Seven of Chūshingura, set in the Ichiriki teahouse of the Gion pleasure quarter in Kyoto, is one of the most famous scenes of the entire kabuki repertoire, in which Okaru — a young woman who has sold herself to the quarter to support her family — overhears the revenge plotters by reading their letter reflected in a mirror. Buncho's portrait fixes Iwai Hanshirō IV in that role at a particular run, presenting the onnagata in the artist's familiar vertical manner: the body composed around the verticality of a courtesan's costume, the patterned outer robe and obi treated as broad printed fields, and the face given the finer linework through which the individual performer was distinguished. As one of the more dramatically charged sheets in Buncho's surviving output, the print preserves both Iwai Hanshirō IV's reading of one of the great female roles of the canon and the specific Morita Theater production within which it was given.