The Puppeteer Kiritake Monjuro with the Puppet Jihei (Right) and Other Puppeteers with Osui, the daughter of Jihei (Center) and Koharu (Left)

This woodblock print depicts a scene from Bunraku—the Japanese puppet theater tradition that emerged in seventeenth-century Osaka—drawing on Chikamatsu Monzaemon's play Shinjū: Ten no Amijima (The Love Suicides at Amijima), one of the foundational texts of the repertoire. The full title identifies three characters: Jihei, the tragic merchant protagonist; his daughter Osui; and Koharu, the courtesan whose fate is bound to Jihei's in the play's final act. Kiritake Monjuro was among the preeminent puppeteers of twentieth-century Bunraku. Sekino's sosaku-hanga approach to theater subjects involved direct attendance at performances and personal carving of all blocks. The layered visual complexity of Bunraku—visible puppeteers in formal black manipulating richly costumed puppet figures against stage settings—offers abundant material for color registration and compositional arrangement across multiple woodblock layers. The print demonstrates Sekino's engagement with Japan's classical performing arts as a source of both cultural documentation and formal invention.