The Actor Iwai Hanshiro IV as Soga no Goro Tokimune in the Play Koi no Yosuga Kanegaki Soga, Performed at the Ichimura Theater in the First Month, 1789

The Soga brothers' revenge — a twelfth-century vendetta story dramatized endlessly in kabuki — provided the New Year season with its most reliable franchise, and almost every Edo theater opened the year with a Soga production. This hosoban print in the Art Institute of Chicago, dated to about 1789, shows Iwai Hanshirō IV as Soga no Gorō Tokimune, the younger and more impetuous of the two brothers, in the first-month Ichimura Theater production of Koi no Yosuga Kanegaki Soga. Although Hanshirō IV was best known as an onnagata, Edo onnagata sometimes took on male roles, particularly in Soga productions where casting could be deliberately unconventional. The print, identified as one sheet of a triptych (the companion sheet survives as 1939.897 in the Art Institute), would originally have been part of a multi-figure composition showing the brothers and their adversaries. Shun'ei captures the figure with characteristic Katsukawa firmness of outline, and the print stands as a typical example of his New Year output from the late 1780s.