Actor Arashi Tokusaburō II (later Kitsusaburō II) as O-Karu with Onoe Kikugorō as Kampei, by Castle Moat in Night Scene (from Chūshingura)

A two-sheet diptych by Kitagawa Toyohide showing a Chūshingura scene in which the actor Arashi Tokusaburō II (who would later succeed as Kitsusaburō II) appears in the cross-dressed female role of O-Karu, joined by Onoe Kikugorō in the role of her husband Kampei, beside a castle moat in a night scene. The Chūshingura - the dramatised retelling of the 1701-1703 vengeance of the forty-seven rōnin of the Akō domain against the magistrate Kira Yoshinaka - was the most-staged play in the entire Edo and Osaka kabuki repertoire across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, restaged in successive adaptations at every major theatre at least once a year. The Kampei-Okaru subplot is one of the most affecting strands of the eleven-act drama: Kampei, dismissed from the household of his lord, retreats with his wife Okaru to her parents' village, where she eventually sells herself into prostitution at the Gion pleasure quarter to fund her husband's contribution to the vendetta. The scene depicted here belongs to the Chūshingura's middle acts, the moment at which Kampei and Okaru meet beside the moat of a castle at night. The diptych format - two ōban sheets composed as a continuous horizontal image - allowed Toyohide to develop the night-scene atmosphere across a wider visual field than the single-figure single-sheet format of his other surviving prints. The work is held by the British Museum, accessioned among its extensive holdings of nineteenth-century Osaka actor prints. Signed Kitagawa Toyohide ga.