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 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.