Act Three: The Quarrel Scene from the play Chushingura (Treasury of the Forty-seven Loyal Retainers)

Katsukawa Shunei's Act Three from Kanadehon Chushingura depicts the corridor of pines at Tsurugaoka Hachiman Shrine, where the young lord Enya Hangan, goaded beyond endurance by the corrupt court official Ko no Moronao, draws his sword and strikes him. The act sets in motion the entire chain of vendetta that occupies the rest of the play and is universally referred to in popular parlance as the matsu no roka or quarrel scene. Shunei composes the moment with several figures along the polished veranda, the gesture of drawn weapon visible against the stylized pines and shrine architecture. As one sheet in his coordinated suite of eleven act prints, this design contributes to one of the most ambitious narrative cycles Shunei undertook. It is an example of the Katsukawa school's capacity to extend its strength in kabuki actor prints into multi-figure stage tableau. As Katsukawa Shunsho's senior pupil, Shunei combined the school's commitment to individualized facial likeness with the demands of a more architectural composition, producing prints that documented not only the actors but the staged moment itself. The Chushingura material was perennial in Edo theatrical culture, repeated each season in revised form, and Shunei's sheets gave it a printed counterpart with comparable staying power. This impression in the Art Institute of Chicago belongs to the museum's run of Shunei's Chushingura act prints, allowing the eleven-scene cycle to be reconstructed.