The Actors Nakamura Utaemon I as Seigen (right), and Ichikawa Komazo II as Shimizu Tonoinosuke Kiyoharu (left), in the Play Soga Moyo Aigo no Wakamatsu, Performed at the Nakamura Theater in the Third Month, 1769

This Edo ukiyo-e print by Ippitsusai Buncho is a paired yakusha-e portrait commemorating Nakamura Utaemon I as the monk Seigen (right) and Ichikawa Komazō II as Shimizu Tonoinosuke Kiyoharu (left) in Soga Moyō Aigo no Wakamatsu, staged at the Nakamura Theater in the third month of 1769. The Art Institute of Chicago preserves the impression and provides the cast and theater. The encounter at the heart of the scene — Seigen, the obsessed and tormented apostate monk, set against the worldly antagonist Shimizu Tonoinosuke — is one of kabuki's recurring confrontations, and Buncho composes the two actors so that the angles of their bodies and the patterns of their costumes register the dramatic charge between them. Seigen on the right is drawn with the particular intensity Buncho reserved for emotionally driven monk roles, the face given finer line and a tightened expression, while Komazō II as the elegantly dressed Kiyoharu balances the composition on the left with a broader, more decoratively patterned costume. Buncho's late-1760s pair sheets, of which this is a representative example, helped consolidate the format in which two performers and their specific roles were captured together on a single sheet, advancing the same project of recognizable, performance-specific yakusha-e that he and Katsukawa Shunshō pursued in parallel through these years.