The Actor Nakamura Tomijuro I as Akushichibyoe Kagekiyo in the Play Kite Hajime Hatsugai Soga, Performed at the Morita Theater in the First Month, 1774

Katsukawa Shunsho shows Nakamura Tomijuro I as the Taira warrior Akushichibyoe Kagekiyo in Kite Hajime Hatsugai Soga, staged at the Morita Theater in the first month of 1774. Tomijuro I is more commonly associated with onnagata female roles, particularly fox spirits, but he could and did play male warrior parts when the casting required it. Kagekiyo is one of the great aragoto figures, a defeated Taira partisan whose legend (often involving self-blinding) ran through generations of kabuki productions. Shunsho captures Tomijuro mid-pose, the body planted square against an unseen opponent, one hand raised in a controlled angular gesture. The Katsukawa school's mature Edo ukiyo-e yakusha-e style is fully present: a hosoban format wide enough for a full standing figure, a recognizable face under the heavy kumadori make-up, a restrained palette of indigo, gray, and a strong red note in the costume, and the workshop's disciplined contour line. Held by the Art Institute of Chicago, the print would have been published within weeks of the New Year opening to capitalize on the season's Soga audience, and survives now both as an aesthetic object and as a primary document of the production. Shunsho and his pupils, working in concert at the Katsukawa workshop, produced many such single-figure portraits across Edo's licensed theaters, and this impression stands among the surviving examples of how a leading onnagata could be portrayed in a serious aragoto male role.