Onoe Shoroku in the role of the tattooed Danshichi

Ota's portrait of Onoe Shoroku as the tattooed Danshichi belongs to the murder scene of Natsu Matsuri Naniwa Kagami, where the fishmonger Danshichi kills his father-in-law Giheiji in the mud of a summer festival. The role demands that the actor strip to a loincloth to reveal the elaborate horimono tattoos covering the back, shoulders, and arms -- one of the explicitly physical roles in the tachiyaku repertoire. Ota's composition likely concentrates on the moment when the body is exposed, with the carved tattoo blocks providing some of the more demanding registration work on the sheet: the tattoo pattern must align across overlapping blocks with the figure's contour. Onoe Shoroku II was a postwar tateyaku whose Danshichi was widely studied. The print exemplifies Ota's interest in the moments where kabuki turns the actor's body into pictorial substance, the costume falling away to leave the painted skin as the print's central visual event.