The Actor Segawa Kikunojo II as the Courtesan Maizuru in the Play Furisode Kisaragi Soga (Soga of the Long, Hanging Sleeves in the Second Month), Performed at the Ichimura Theater from the Twentieth Day of the Second Month, 1772

In this hosoban print by Ippitsusai Buncho, held by the Art Institute of Chicago, the great onnagata Segawa Kikunojo II appears as the courtesan Maizuru in the play Furisode Kisaragi Soga, translated by the museum as Soga of the Long, Hanging Sleeves in the Second Month. The production was performed at the Ichimura Theater beginning on the twentieth day of the second month of 1772. The play belongs to the extensive Edo kabuki tradition of Soga adaptations, in which the revenge of the Soga brothers is interwoven with romantic subplots set in the Yoshiwara pleasure district and similar urban quarters. Segawa Kikunojo II's Maizuru would have offered audiences a refined courtesan figure in seasonally appropriate kimono, and Buncho's image presents that figure with careful attention to fabric pattern, sleeve cut, and pose. The hosoban sheet, slender and vertical, gives the actor's full standing figure the dominant role in the composition, with inscribed identifications above the figure tying the print to a specific Edo production. Buncho's yakusha-e of this period are central to the documentation of Edo kabuki in the late 1760s and early 1770s, and they are widely recognized within Edo ukiyo-e as a parallel achievement to those of Katsukawa Shunsho. The Art Institute of Chicago's holding preserves the print as one node in a much larger network of mid-Edo actor portraiture.