The Actors Bando Zenji I as Nagahashi Saburo, Iwai Hanshiro IV as Otatsu-gitsune, Nakamura Konozo as Hagai Ujitsune, and an Unidentified Actor (right to left), in the Play Nue no Mori Ichiyo no Mato, Performed at the Nakamura Theater in the Eleventh Month, 1770

This multi-figure Katsukawa Shunsho composition, preserved in the Art Institute of Chicago, gathers four performers from the 1770 Nakamura Theater production of Nue no Mori Ichiyo no Mato: Bando Zenji I as Nagahashi Saburo, Iwai Hanshiro IV as the fox-spirit Otatsu, Nakamura Konozo as Hagai Ujitsune, and an unidentified fourth actor. The play drew on the legendary motif of the nue, a chimerical creature whose mythological resonance gave Kabuki dramatists rich material for supernatural spectacle. Shunsho arranges the four figures across the sheet in carefully differentiated poses, allowing each actor's identity to register through costume and physiognomy while still binding them into a single narrative tableau. Iwai Hanshiro IV's transformation role as a fox-woman is rendered with the subtle eeriness appropriate to the genre of henge-mono, dance plays in which performers shift between human and supernatural states. As Katsukawa school yakusha-e, the print belongs to the body of work through which Shunsho redefined Edo ukiyo-e's relationship to the Kabuki theater. By portraying named individuals with specific likenesses rather than generic actor-types, he made the print itself a kind of secondary performance that preserved the cast list of a single production. For modern scholars and collectors, the sheet is both an aesthetic object in its own right and a primary source on the staging of Nue no Mori Ichiyo no Mato at one of Edo's three licensed theaters.