The Actors Otani Hiroemon III as Shinagawa Okaminosuke (right), and Ichikawa Danjuro V as Arashishi Otokonosuke (left), in the Play Fuki Kaete Tsuki mo Yoshiwara (Rethatched Roof: The Moon also Shines Over the Yoshiwara Pleasure District), Performed at the Morita Theater in the Eleventh Month, 1771

This Katsukawa Shunsho diptych pairs Otani Hiroemon III as Shinagawa Okaminosuke at right with Ichikawa Danjuro V as Arashishi Otokonosuke at left, drawn from the eleventh-month 1771 Morita Theater staging of Fuki Kaete Tsuki mo Yoshiwara, a kaomise production set in the Yoshiwara pleasure district. The title, which translates as roughly Rethatched Roof: The Moon Also Shines Over the Yoshiwara, refers to the season's renewal of the theater roster and the entertainment quarter the play was constructed to celebrate. Danjuro V (1741-1806) was the leading actor of his generation and the patriarch of the Ichikawa line, and Shunsho's record of his swaggering Otokonosuke is a touchstone of Edo ukiyo-e yakusha-e: the broad shoulders, the dramatic glare, the costume pattern modulated to the bravado of the aragoto manner the Ichikawa family had championed since the late seventeenth century. Paired with him, Hiroemon III holds the more reserved villainous stance. The Katsukawa school's mature multi-figure compositions, of which this diptych is a fine example, balanced individual likenesses against the spatial logic of the stage. Shunsho's leadership in late eighteenth-century Edo ukiyo-e meant that prints like this functioned both as commercial souvenirs and as the period's primary visual archive of kabuki performance, recording details of role, costume, and likeness that no other medium preserved.