Actor Nakamura Tomijūrō as Matsukaze

Nakamura Tomijūrō, an Osaka kabuki onnagata, is shown by Kitagawa Toyohide in the female role of Matsukaze, the protagonist of one of the most-staged kabuki and nō plays of the entire Japanese theatrical canon. The Matsukaze legend, set on the desolate Suma shore where the exiled Heian courtier Ariwara no Yukihira was said to have lived in solitude, tells of the ghosts of two salt-gathering sisters, Matsukaze and Murasame, who appear at his memorial pine to enact in dance their continuing attachment to the long-dead nobleman. The story descends from the nō play Matsukaze attributed to Kan'ami and Zeami, and was reworked across the centuries into a succession of kabuki and jōruri adaptations. By the late 1830s, when Toyohide produced this 1839 single-actor portrait, the role of Matsukaze had become one of the senior assignments of the Osaka onnagata repertoire, requiring an actor capable of conveying the static, suspended quality of the ghost figure across a sustained dance sequence. Nakamura Tomijūrō - whose career stretched across the late Tenpō and Kaei eras - took on the role at the Kado-no-shibai or Naka-no-shibai theatre of Osaka. The print, signed under the gō Ichiryūtei, belongs to the final pre-Tenpō-Reform period of Osaka print production and exemplifies the connoisseur-oriented single-figure composition that characterised the city's print culture immediately before the 1842 sumptuary crackdown. Held by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.