Photo kabuki magazine October 1925

Companion piece to the November cover from the same 1925 theatrical publication. As with the later issue, the October magazine print represents Hasui working outside his usual landscape genre on a commissioned theatrical subject. The 1925 production date places the work within the post-earthquake reconstruction period, when Hasui and Watanabe were rebuilding their print operation after the September 1923 fire destroyed their inventory of blocks and impressions. Magazine commissions provided steady, smaller-scale work for shin-hanga artists between the editioning of larger landscape series. The printing would have employed the same workshop infrastructure used for Hasui's landscape prints — multiple keyblocks, registered color blocks, and the bokashi and gofun techniques associated with Watanabe's studio — but applied to figure-and-stage subject matter that more typically belonged to the yakusha-e (actor print) tradition descended from earlier ukiyo-e specialists like Sharaku and Toyokuni.