The Actor Ichikawa Danjuro V as Kazusa no Akushichibyoe Kagekiyo in the Play Edo no Hana Mimasu Soga, Performed at the Nakamura Theater in the Third Month, 1783

Held by the Art Institute of Chicago and dated to about 1783, this Katsukawa Shunjō hosoban print depicts the actor Ichikawa Danjūrō V as Kazusa no Akushichibyōe Kagekiyo in the play Edo no Hana Mimasu Soga, performed at the Nakamura Theater in the third month of 1783. Ichikawa Danjūrō V (1741–1806) was the leading aragoto (rough-style) actor of the Tenmei era and the fifth holder of the most prestigious Edo acting name, the Ichikawa Danjūrō line whose founder had developed the aragoto style of bold, exaggerated, supernaturally charged warrior performance in the late seventeenth century. Akushichibyōe Kagekiyo, sometimes called Heike no Kagekiyo, is the historical Taira warrior who in legend survived the destruction of his clan at Dan-no-ura in 1185 and waged a private war against the victorious Minamoto — a story preserved in the Heike monogatari and dramatized in successive cycles of Noh and kabuki. Within the Soga-mono framework of Edo no Hana Mimasu Soga, Kagekiyo would have appeared as a powerful aragoto-style figure whose presence cuts across the central Soga revenge narrative — the kind of cross-cycle synthesis that defined the Edo theatrical adaptation of medieval epic material. The third-month performance places the production within the spring theatrical season at the Nakamura-za, and the title's reference to the mimasu (the three-rice-measure mon of the Ichikawa Danjūrō line) explicitly foregrounds Danjūrō V's starring presence. Shunjō's hosoban records this specific performance with the standard Katsukawa apparatus: individualized actor likeness, role-specific costume, identifying mon, and cartouche text fixing the production within the Tenmei theatrical calendar.