The Actor Segawa Kikunojo III as Lady Tomoe (Tomoe Gozen) in the Play Onna Musha Kiku no Sen'yoki, Performed at the Morita Theater in the Eleventh Month, 1786

Held by the Art Institute of Chicago and dated to about 1786, this Katsukawa Shunjō hosoban print depicts the actor Segawa Kikunojō III as Lady Tomoe (Tomoe Gozen) in the play Onna Musha Kiku no Sen'yoki, performed at the Morita Theater in the eleventh month of 1786. Tomoe Gozen is one of the iconic female warriors of the Japanese epic tradition: the wife or concubine of the twelfth-century Minamoto general Kiso Yoshinaka, she fought alongside him in the Genpei War as one of his last surviving retainers and is preserved in the Heike monogatari and successive medieval and Edo dramatizations as the paradigmatic onna-musha (woman warrior) figure. The role demanded an onnagata capable of carrying both martial and feminine presence — sword work and combat staging combined with the costume vocabulary of a high-ranking warrior woman — and the pairing of Segawa Kikunojō III (1751–1810), the leading onnagata of the Tenmei era, with the role is itself significant casting. The eleventh-month staging was the kaomise (face-showing) production, the ceremonial opening of the new theatrical year at the Morita Theater, and Kaomise productions like this one customarily included elaborate display roles for the company's leading performers. Shunjō's design follows the standard Katsukawa hosoban formula — a single full-figure actor in role-specific costume identified by likeness and mon (family crest) — with the play title, role, theater, and performance month recorded in cartouche. The print is among the latest dated works in Shunjō's surviving corpus: he would die the following year, in 1787, making this kaomise design one of the closing entries in his short Tenmei-era career.