The Actor Ichikawa Danjuro IV in the Role of an Immortal Hermit (Sennin), Possibly Tenjiku Tokubei in the Play Tenjiku Tokubei Kokyo no Torikaji (Tenjiku Tokubei Turns the Helm Toward Home), Performed at the Nakamura Theater in the Eighth Month, 1768

Held by the Art Institute of Chicago and documented through ukiyo-e.org, this Katsukawa Shunsho yakusha-e depicts the actor Ichikawa Danjuro IV in the role of an immortal hermit (sennin), possibly the magician-adventurer Tenjiku Tokubei in the play Tenjiku Tokubei Kokyo no Torikaji (Tenjiku Tokubei Turns the Helm Toward Home), performed at the Nakamura Theater in the Eighth Month, 1768. Tenjiku Tokubei was a stock figure of supernatural kabuki who summoned giant toads through magical hand seals and was repeatedly reincarnated across plays from the early 1750s onward. Shunsho, as founder of the Katsukawa school and the chief reformer of Edo ukiyo-e actor portraiture, here renders Danjuro IV with the individuating likeness that distinguished his work from the older Torii school manner. The figure assumes a wide, grounded stance typical of magical and aragoto-tinged roles, robes layered to suggest a hermit's strangeness rather than a contemporary samurai's reserve. The single-figure format against an unmodulated ground, characteristic of Shunsho's mid-career yakusha-e, lets the costume's bold patterning and the actor's facial signature carry the entire image. As a record of one of Edo's foremost stage families inhabiting a famous supernatural role, this print captures both the appetite of Edo ukiyo-e audiences for magical kabuki and the Katsukawa school's role in feeding that appetite.