Onoe Shoroku II as Danshichi Kurobe in the play Natsu Matsuri Naniwa Kagami

This portrait captures Onoe Shoroku II in one of the signature roles of the kabuki repertoire — Danshichi Kurobe, the Osaka fishmonger at the center of Natsu Matsuri Naniwa Kagami (Summer Festival: Mirror of Osaka), the 1745 play by Namiki Senryu. Ota likely depicts the actor in the celebrated mud-slinging scene where Danshichi kills his father-in-law Giheiji as the summer festival passes offstage, his full-body irezumi revealed beneath disordered robes. The role demands a specific physical vocabulary that Shoroku II became known for inhabiting in his Showa-era performances. As with Ota's other actor portraits, the print renders the costume's textures and the tattoo pattern through controlled colour blocks and [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) gradation, prioritising the legibility of the character's identity over decorative effect. The work belongs to Ota's extended project of documenting leading kabuki performers — a body of work that functions, taken together, as a visual catalogue of mid-twentieth-century Tokyo kabuki, each sheet rooted in his habit of sketching actors during live performances at theaters such as the Kabuki-za.