The Actor Yamashita Kinsaku II in cloth-bleaching (Nuno sarashi) dance

This [hosoban](/glossary/hosoban) print by Ippitsusai Buncho, in the Art Institute of Chicago, depicts the actor Yamashita Kinsaku II in a Nuno sarashi or cloth-bleaching dance, one of the standard solo dance pieces of Edo kabuki. In Nuno sarashi, the performer manipulates long strips of white cloth in flowing patterns, evoking the work of washing and bleaching fabric in a river. The dance demanded a refined control of fabric and body line, and was typically taken by leading onnagata, including specialists such as Yamashita Kinsaku II. Buncho's design centers the figure within the narrow hosoban sheet, allowing the long sweep of cloth to play against the vertical of the composition and against the costume's patterned ground. The print is characteristic of Buncho's contribution to [yakusha-e](/glossary/yakusha-e), or kabuki actor prints, in the late 1760s and early 1770s: a single figure presented with attention to individual features, costume detail, and the specific demands of the performance, in the Edo [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e) idiom that he and Katsukawa Shunsho did so much to define. Without a specific theater inscription, the sheet sits within a broader category of dance prints rather than a documentary record of one production, but it nevertheless preserves the visual conventions through which a famous solo dance was promoted and remembered by Edo audiences. The Art Institute of Chicago preserves this work among its Edo-period holdings.