Actor Nakamura Nakazô I as Ono Sadakurô in “Model for Kana Calligraphy: Treasury of the 47 Loyal Retainers” (“Kanadehon Chûshingura”)

Katsukawa Shunsho captures Nakamura Nakazo I in the role that made his reputation: Ono Sadakuro in Kanadehon Chushingura ("Model for Kana Calligraphy: Treasury of the 47 Loyal Retainers"). Sadakuro is the dissolute son of a ronin who murders a peasant in Act Five for a small purse of money before being shot, almost as an afterthought, by a wild boar hunter. Nakazo I's rethinking of the role in the 1760s, where he abandoned the broad villain conventions of the past and played Sadakuro as a coldly elegant Edo dandy in a black kimono and broken umbrella, became one of the most famous reinterpretations in kabuki history. Shunsho's print, held by the Art Institute of Chicago, preserves that image: a slim black-clad figure with hair loose around the temples, the rain-soaked silhouette legible against the page. The Katsukawa school's reformed Edo ukiyo-e yakusha-e is the perfect medium for such a performance because Shunsho's particularizing eye records exactly the features and posture by which Nakazo distinguished his Sadakuro from any other actor's. The Chushingura cycle was performed continuously across the Edo period, and Shunsho and his pupils produced a great many actor prints from various productions; this image stands among the most influential, partly because it documents a turning point in the history of kabuki performance and partly because it crystallizes the Katsukawa school's ability to fix a living theatrical moment in print.