Actor Nakamura Noshio I as the Fox-Wife from Furui in “First Performance Day of the Izu Calendar” (“Izu-goyomi Shibai no Ganjitsu”)

Katsukawa Shunsho records Nakamura Noshio I in the spectacular role of the fox-wife from Furui in the play Izu-goyomi Shibai no Ganjitsu, First Performance Day of the Izu Calendar. The shape-shifting fox-wife was a beloved figure in Edo kabuki, drawing on a long literary tradition of yokai and animal-spirit tales, and the role gave an onnagata the opportunity to combine seductive femininity with sudden supernatural transformation. Noshio I (1740-1782) was one of the celebrated onnagata of the late eighteenth century, and Shunsho's print, held in the Art Institute of Chicago, captures him at a moment when his fox-wife performance was the talk of the season. The Katsukawa school's commitment to portraying individual actors rather than role types meant that Shunsho's yakusha-e could record specific star turns in a way that earlier Torii-school prints had not, fixing in print the particular gesture, costume, and bearing that distinguished one player's interpretation from another's. Shunsho situates the figure against an unprinted ground in the Katsukawa manner, the textured kimono pattern and the angle of the head doing most of the work. The print sits within the broader Edo ukiyo-e tradition of theatrical commemoration and demonstrates why Shunsho's approach so quickly displaced the conventions that had preceded it, becoming the standard manner of the yakusha-e genre for the remainder of the eighteenth century.