The Actor Nakayama Kojuro VI as Osada no Taro Kagemune (in Reality Hatcho Tsubute no Kiheiji), in the Guise of a Lamplighter of Gion Shrine, in Act Three from Part One of the Play Yukimotsu Take Furisode Genji (Snow-Covered Bamboo: Genji in Long Sleeves), Performed at the Nakamura Theater from the First Day of the Eleventh Month, 1785

This Katsukawa Shunsho print, dating to about 1780, records Nakayama Kojuro VI as Osada no Taro Kagemune, who in this play is in reality the outlaw Hatcho Tsubute no Kiheiji, here further disguised as a lamplighter of Gion Shrine, in Act Three of Part One of Yukimotsu Take Furisode Genji (Snow-Covered Bamboo: Genji in Long Sleeves), performed at the Nakamura Theater from the first day of the eleventh month of 1785. The layered disguise sequence is characteristic of late eighteenth-century kabuki, in which a single role would carry multiple successive identities and the actor's job was to make each layer expressively legible without dissolving the underlying character. Nakayama Kojuro VI was the stage name of an actor in the leading male-role tradition, and his appearance as a lamplighter of Gion Shrine in this play would have offered both an opportunity for atmospheric stagecraft and a chance to reveal the violent outlaw beneath. The Art Institute of Chicago print, in Shunsho's mature hosoban yakusha-e style, applies the Katsukawa school's actor-likeness approach: Kojuro VI is identifiable through his specific facial features, with the costume and accessories of a Gion lamplighter signaling the surface identity. The eleventh-month kaomise productions, the most heavily marketed in the Edo kabuki year, generated correspondingly heavy yakusha-e output from the Katsukawa school, and this print represents the kind of multi-layered character recording that Shunsho's Edo ukiyo-e specialized in.