The Actor Nakamura Nakazo I as Taira no Tomomori Disguised as Tokaiya Gimpei, in the Play Yoshitsune Sembon-zakura, Performed at the Morita Theater in the Fourth Month, 1777

This Katsukawa Shunsho yakusha-e records Nakamura Nakazo I in the role of Taira no Tomomori disguised as the boatman Tokaiya Gimpei, from a fourth-month 1777 production of Yoshitsune Sembon-zakura at Edo's Morita Theater. Yoshitsune Sembon-zakura, one of the three great masterworks of kabuki and joruri puppet theater, dramatizes the supposed survival of Heike loyalists after the Genpei War's catastrophic naval battle at Dan-no-ura. Tomomori, the powerful Taira general, is reintroduced as a humble boatman, only to reveal his identity and meet a famously theatrical end. Nakamura Nakazo I was admired in the late eighteenth century for the gravity and intelligence he brought to such double-natured roles, and Shunsho's portrait records both his stage presence and the specific likeness of his features. The print, in the Art Institute of Chicago, uses the hosoban format that Shunsho and the Katsukawa school had standardized for actor portraits, concentrating visual energy on the figure and his costume. Shunsho's commitment to actor-likeness, which had been emerging since the late 1760s and was fully consolidated in his Yakusha ehon (illustrated actor books) and individual sheets of the 1770s, transformed Edo ukiyo-e by treating performers as identifiable individuals rather than interchangeable types. As both portraiture and theatrical documentation, this print belongs to the central body of Shunsho's mature yakusha-e and helps preserve the historical record of one of kabuki's most performed plays and one of its most distinguished actors.