The Actor Ichikawa Monnosuke II as the Renegade Monk Zenjibo Disguised as Dainichibo in the Play Edo no Fuji Wakayagi Soga, Performed at the Nakamura Theater in the First Month, 1789

This print by Katsukawa Shunsho records Ichikawa Monnosuke II in the part of the renegade monk Zenjibo, disguised as Dainichibo, in Edo no Fuji Wakayagi Soga, mounted at the Nakamura Theater in the first month of 1789. The first-month kaomise productions were the heart of the Edo theatre calendar, presenting the company's contracted players in newly composed Soga-themed dramas, and the role of a corrupted cleric in disguise gave Monnosuke an opportunity for a layered performance of false piety. Shunsho's yakusha-e captures this duality without resorting to the violent contortion of later Edo ukiyo-e portraiture. As founder of the Katsukawa school, he had by the late 1780s established the conventions that virtually all single-actor printmaking would follow until the brief eruption of Sharaku in 1794. The narrow hosoban format frames the body almost full-length, kosode and surplice rendered with clear contour and unmodulated colour, while subtle expressive notes are concentrated in the face and hands. This impression is held in the Clarence Buckingham Collection at the Art Institute of Chicago, where it joins a substantial body of Shunsho and Katsukawa school yakusha-e that documents the casts and repertoire of the three licensed Edo theatres during the An'ei and Tenmei eras. Such prints functioned both as souvenirs for theatre-goers and as portable advertising for the actors themselves, intertwining the worlds of commercial printmaking and stage celebrity that defined late eighteenth-century Edo popular culture.