Act Eight: Bridal Journey, from the play "Treasury of Loyal Retainers (Chushingura)"

Katsukawa Shunsho's print depicting Act Eight, the famous michiyuki or 'bridal journey,' from Kanadehon Chushingura draws on one of kabuki's most enduring sequences. In the play's narrative, Konami travels with her mother Tonase across mountainous country to fulfill her marriage promise to Oboshi Rikiya, the son of the lord of the forty-seven ronin. The journey is staged as a lyrical interlude between scenes of conspiracy and tragedy, a long dance-poem of landscape, longing, and resolution. Shunsho, working in Edo ukiyo-e in the heart of the 1770s, found in this scene an opportunity to combine yakusha-e with the contemplative atmosphere of travel imagery. The two women, presumably embodied by leading onnagata, move through generalized landscape across the hosoban sheet now in the Art Institute of Chicago. Although Chushingura prints would multiply across the nineteenth century, Shunsho's contributions stand near the beginning of the tradition, while the play itself was still relatively new to the stage. The Katsukawa school's commitment to recognizable actor portraiture is here reconciled with the dance-piece nature of the michiyuki, in which costume, posture, and choreography are themselves the substance of the scene. The print quietly suggests the bittersweet weight Tonase and Konami carry along their route, even as it preserves the visual style of a specific kabuki performance. Within Shunsho's broad oeuvre, dominated by single-actor portraits and gakuya scenes, this sheet attests to his interest in the wider expressive range of Edo kabuki and his readiness to translate its most cherished sequences into print.