The Actor Iwai Hanshiro IV as Tsukisayo in the Play Gohiiki Nenne Soga, Performed at the Nakamura Theater in the First Month, 1779

Katsukawa Shunsho's portrait of Iwai Hanshiro IV as Tsukisayo in Gohiiki Nenne Soga, performed at the Nakamura Theater in the first month of 1779, captures one of the leading onnagata of late eighteenth-century Edo in a New Year Soga production. Plays involving the Soga brothers, the historical avengers of their murdered father, were a near-mandatory feature of the Edo theatrical calendar during the first month of each year, and audiences expected to see the major actors of each company in newly devised Soga variants. Iwai Hanshiro IV, celebrated for the refinement and emotional clarity of his female roles, was among the most heavily portrayed actors in Katsukawa school yakusha-e. Shunsho's print, in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, applies the school's actor-likeness approach with characteristic care: Hanshiro IV is identified through specific facial features and elegant onnagata bearing rather than through generic theatrical idiom. The hosoban format frames the single figure with restrained surrounding space, allowing the patterning of his robe and the cast of his expression to dominate. The role of Tsukisayo within the New Year Soga performance would have given Hanshiro IV opportunities for both lyrical and dramatic moments, and Shunsho's print preserves a particular instant of that performance. Within Edo ukiyo-e, the Katsukawa school's monthly output of yakusha-e for each major theatrical season constituted an ongoing visual chronicle of kabuki, and this print stands as a representative entry from its mature decade.