The Actor Onoe Matsusuke I as Kobayashi no Asahina Disguised as a Bird-Catcher in the Play Edo no Haru Meisho Soga, Performed at the Ichimura Theater in the Third Month, 1773

Katsukawa Shunsho catches Onoe Matsusuke I as the comic warrior Kobayashi no Asahina disguised as a bird-catcher in Edo no Haru Meisho Soga ("Spring in Edo: Famous Places of the Soga"), performed at the Ichimura Theater in the third month of 1773. The hosoban print, held by the Art Institute of Chicago, shows Matsusuke in the bird-catcher's working clothes, the long pole and lime-tipped tools of the trade tucked at the shoulder while the heavy braced legs of the underlying warrior body strain against the disguise. Asahina was a stock figure of Soga plays, the loyal retainer whose blunt physical humor offset the brothers' more serious revenge plot, and the bird-catcher costume gave Matsusuke a fresh angle on a role audiences already knew well. Shunsho's design treats the figure as a portrait rather than a type, a hallmark of his Katsukawa school reform of Edo ukiyo-e yakusha-e. The face is specific to Matsusuke, with the broad cheekbones and good-humored mouth audiences would have recognized; the costume is built out of a few well-chosen blocks of indigo, brown, and ocher; and the printed outline does most of the descriptive work. The sheet would have circulated as both publicity and souvenir for the production, and survives now as a primary visual record of a specific third-month Ichimura run and as a fine sample of the Katsukawa workshop's narrative use of the yakusha-e format in early 1770s Edo.