The Actor Ichikawa Monnosuke II as the Ghost of the Renegade Monk Seigen in the Play Edo no Hana Mimasu Soga, Performed at the Nakamura Theater in the Second Month, 1783

This Katsukawa Shunsho yakusha-e depicts Ichikawa Monnosuke II as the ghost of the renegade monk Seigen in Edo no Hana Mimasu Soga, performed at the Nakamura Theater in the second month of 1783. The Seigen and Sakurahime story -- of a Buddhist monk's transgressive love for the princess Sakurahime and his subsequent return as a vengeful ghost -- was one of the most enduring ghost-and-passion themes of the kabuki stage, woven repeatedly into Soga-cycle programmes. Ghost roles were a particularly demanding subgenre of male performance, requiring the actor to evoke an unsettling combination of weakness, rage and supernatural fixation. Shunsho's hosoban portrait places Monnosuke in the iconic dishevelled appearance of the role: hair partly loose, robes worn open, the face individualised so that the actor remains recognisable even within the ghost's spectral identity. The Katsukawa school's mature manner of clean contour and disciplined colour gives the apparition a graphic clarity rather than a pictorial blur, in keeping with the conventions of Edo ukiyo-e at this date. The Clarence Buckingham Collection at the Art Institute of Chicago preserves the impression. The print serves both as a record of a specific 1783 Nakamura cast and as an example of Shunsho's range within yakusha-e, which extended from heroic aragoto display through dignified onnagata roles to the chilling ghost subjects represented here.