The Actor Ichikawa Danjuro V as Hanakawado no Sukeroku in the Play Nanakusa Yosooi Soga, Performed at the Nakamura Theater in the Fifth Month, 1782

Held by the Art Institute of Chicago, this Katsukawa Shunsho yakusha-e depicts Ichikawa Danjuro V in the role of Hanakawado no Sukeroku from the play Nanakusa Yosooi Soga, performed at the Nakamura Theater in the fifth month of 1782. Sukeroku was the signature role of the Ichikawa Danjuro lineage, and Danjuro V's performance of it was considered a landmark interpretation of the part, sustained across multiple seasons of revival. Shunsho composes the actor in the iconic Sukeroku pose, with the purple headband (hachimaki), the elegant kimono, the wooden geta, and the deliberate swagger that defined the character's appeal to Edo audiences as the archetypal floating-world dandy. The Soga-mono framework, into which Sukeroku narratives were typically embedded, allowed the otherwise contemporary character to participate in the medieval Soga brothers' vendetta cycle through a complex layering of disguise and identity. As founder of the Katsukawa school of Edo ukiyo-e, Shunsho built his career on the documentary recording of named performers, and his repeated treatment of Danjuro V across the actor's career produced one of the great visual chronicles of any single performer in the period. The Art Institute's sheet preserves a major example of that chronicle and of Shunsho's command of yakusha-e at its mature phase, fixing the visual identity of Danjuro V's Sukeroku for subsequent generations.