The Actors Nakamura Noshio I as Nyosan no Miya (right), Ichikawa Danjuro V as the Renegade Monk Yochin (center), and Yamashita Kinsaku II as the Maid Mutsuhana (left), in the Play Fuki Kaete Tsuki mo Yoshiwara, Performed at the Morita Theater in the Eleventh Month, 1771

This Katsukawa Shunsho design, in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, brings together three principal performers from a single 1771 production at the Morita Theater: Nakamura Noshio I as Nyosan no Miya, Ichikawa Danjuro V as the renegade monk Yochin, and Yamashita Kinsaku II as the maid Mutsuhana. The play Fuki Kaete Tsuki mo Yoshiwara provided the occasion for a tableau in which onnagata refinement, aragoto bravura, and supporting comic energy could be juxtaposed on a single sheet. Shunsho's composition exploits this contrast, placing the three actors in distinct postures and costumes while still binding them into a coherent group portrait. The presence of Danjuro V, a defining figure of late-eighteenth-century Edo Kabuki, anchors the design, and Shunsho gives him the swaggering stance appropriate to the Ichikawa line's tradition of heroic excess. The two onnagata flanking him display the subtler theatrical vocabulary of female-role acting, with their gestures and gazes carefully calibrated. As Katsukawa school yakusha-e, the print belongs to the cohort of works in which Shunsho consolidated the visual conventions of likeness-based actor portraiture within Edo ukiyo-e. It also documents an exact moment in Kabuki history, useful to later scholars who use such prints to reconstruct casting, costume, and staging for a theatrical tradition that left no photographic record of its eighteenth-century triumphs.