The Actor Ichikawa Danzo IV as Tonase in the Play Kanadehon Chushingura, Performed at the Morita Theater in the Third Month, 1781

Katsukawa Shunsho here records Ichikawa Danzo IV in the female role of Tonase, mother of the young heroine Konami, in a production of Kanadehon Chushingura at the Morita Theater in the third month of 1781. Tonase appears most prominently in the celebrated Yamashina scene of Act IX, in which she accompanies her daughter on a winter journey to deliver Konami to her betrothed and ultimately submits to a heart-rending ritualised confrontation. The role was traditionally assigned to a senior male actor capable of inhabiting an older woman with restraint and gravitas. Ichikawa Danzo IV was the kind of seasoned player to whom such parts naturally fell, and Shunsho's yakusha-e captures him in the disciplined posture and sober costume that distinguish Tonase from the more decorative onnagata figures of the play. The Katsukawa school's mature manner is fully on display: hosoban format, full-length figure, individualised face, firm contour and flat colour. The impression is held in the Clarence Buckingham Collection at the Art Institute of Chicago. As one of a number of Shunsho prints documenting Edo productions of Chushingura, it adds to the visual record of a play whose theatrical and printed afterlife is more thoroughly chronicled in Edo ukiyo-e than that of any other piece of the kabuki repertoire.