The Actor Ichikawa Danjuro V as the Monk Mongaku Disguised as Seizaemon Bozu in the Play Oakinai Hiru ga Kojima, Performed at the Nakamura Theater in the Eleventh Month, 1784

Katsukawa Shunsho here portrays Ichikawa Danjuro V as the monk Mongaku disguised as Seizaemon Bozu in Oakinai Hiru ga Kojima, performed at the Nakamura Theater in the eleventh month of 1784. Mongaku is one of the great repentant warrior-monks of medieval Japanese legend, traditionally associated with rigorous austerities under a waterfall, and his appearance in disguise under another monastic identity gave Danjuro V a layered role combining aragoto power with religious dress. Shunsho's hosoban yakusha-e treats the figure in his disguised guise of Seizaemon Bozu, the dark monastic robes contrasted with the individualised face that identifies the actor to Edo audiences. The eleventh-month kaomise was the most important Edo theatre event of the year, and Shunsho's prints of the Nakamura programmes for Tenmei 4 form an important block of records for the Katsukawa school's late peak period. The Clarence Buckingham Collection at the Art Institute of Chicago holds the impression. The print illustrates the school's continuing capacity to produce nuanced portraits of Danjuro V, the central male figure of late eighteenth-century Edo kabuki, in roles that combined the family's heroic aragoto identity with the disguises, religious dress and reversals on which late jidaimono dramaturgy depended. It remains a representative late-Tenmei example of Edo ukiyo-e yakusha-e at the height of the Katsukawa school's reach.