The Actors Kasaya Matakuro II as Nobuyori Disguised as the Yakko Gunnai (right), and Miyazaki Hachizo as the Lay Monk Hambyo Nyudo (left), in the Play Nue no Mori Ichiyo no Mato, Performed at the Nakamura Theater in the Eleventh Month, 1770

This Katsukawa Shunsho diptych composition, in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, pairs two actors from the 1770 Nakamura Theater production of Nue no Mori Ichiyo no Mato: Kasaya Matakuro II as the conspirator Nobuyori disguised as the manservant Gunnai, and Miyazaki Hachizo as the lay monk Hambyo Nyudo. The convention of disguise, central to so much Kabuki dramaturgy, gave Shunsho an opportunity to register the doubled identity of Matakuro's character through costume choices that suggest the persona of a yakko while still hinting at the courtier hidden beneath. Hachizo, in his monk's robes, anchors the other side of the sheet with a contrasting silhouette, his shaven head and heavy garments setting up a visual rhythm with the patterned dress of his counterpart. Shunsho's lines articulate the tension between the two figures, suggesting an unspoken confrontation that would have been familiar to playgoers who attended the production. The print belongs to the mature phase of Katsukawa school yakusha-e, when likeness-based portraiture, narrative legibility, and decorative design had been integrated into a coherent house style. For Edo ukiyo-e in the 1770s, sheets of this kind functioned both as collectible art objects and as documentary records of how individual actors interpreted plays drawn from medieval legend, in this case the nue narrative that supplied the play its supernatural framework.