The Actor Yamashita Kinsaku II as the maid Tsumagi in the play "Otokyama O-Edo no Ishizue," performed at the Kiri Theater in the eleventh month, 1794

Katsukawa Shunei's print of Yamashita Kinsaku II as the maid Tsumagi documents a kaomise season-opener at the Kiri Theater in the eleventh month of 1794. The Kiri, a hikae yagura or substitute theater, hosted productions on behalf of one of the licensed houses when the parent troupe was in financial difficulty, and Shunei's record of its eleventh-month bill is a small but useful piece of evidence for the shifting institutional shape of late-eighteenth-century Edo kabuki. Yamashita Kinsaku II, a younger member of the prominent Yamashita line of onnagata, plays the supporting maid Tsumagi in Otokoyama O-Edo no Ishizue. Shunei renders him in a stooping, slightly self-effacing posture appropriate to the maid role, the kimono pattern crisply outlined and the face given the precise individualized likeness that the Katsukawa school made the standard of Edo [yakusha-e](/glossary/yakusha-e). As Katsukawa Shunsho's senior pupil, Shunei was by this date the most prolific designer of kabuki actor prints in the city, and his attention to secondary players such as Kinsaku II ensured that the visual record of an Edo season was not restricted to its marquee leads. This impression is preserved in the Art Institute of Chicago, where it sits among related Shunei prints from the same eleventh-month 1794 bills and supports detailed reconstruction of a single kabuki season.