The Actor Yamashita Kinsaku II as Lady Kikusui (Kikusui Gozen) (?) in the Play Kaeribana Eiyu Taiheiki (?), Performed at the Nakamura Theater (?) in the Eleventh Month, 1779 (?)

Reproduced through the ukiyo-e.org database from a sheet held by the Art Institute of Chicago, this Katsukawa Shunsho yakusha-e depicts the actor Yamashita Kinsaku II in the female role of Lady Kikusui (Kikusui Gozen) from the play Kaeribana Eiyu Taiheiki, performed at the Nakamura Theater in the eleventh month of 1779. Kinsaku II belonged to a celebrated lineage of onnagata specialists, and Shunsho's documentation of the Yamashita house contributes to the visual record of the period's leading female-role performers. The composition isolates the figure against a clean ground, with the kimono pattern, the carriage of the body, and the angle of the face all working in concert to convey both the dramatic register of Kikusui Gozen and the recognizable likeness of the actor playing her. As founder of the Katsukawa school of Edo ukiyo-e, Shunsho established the convention that yakusha-e prints should treat performers as individuals rather than as generic theatrical types, a methodological position that this sheet illustrates with particular clarity. The eleventh-month, or kaomise, season opened the new theatrical year in Edo and was always a high-stakes occasion for which audiences expected major new productions, making the period a peak window for Katsukawa school print output. The image preserves the record of one such kaomise season at the Nakamura Theater.