"Ei of the Nakamoriken Brothel, who was a favorite of Yamamura Goto, as Lady Huayang (Kayō Fujin Yamamura Goto gonomi Nakamoriken Ei)," from the series Costume Parade of the Shimanouchi District in Osaka (Naniwa Shimanouchi nerimono)

This 1836 print by Ryūsai Shigeharu, held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art (accession 2020.305), is the right sheet of a diptych depicting Ei of the Nakamoriken brothel — a favorite of the actor Yamamura Goto — costumed as the Chinese imperial concubine Lady Huayang (Kayō Fujin) for the annual costume parade of Osaka's Shimanouchi pleasure quarter. The Naniwa Shimanouchi nerimono series was a multi-artist project documenting the annual nerimono procession in which the courtesans of the Shimanouchi district paraded through the streets in elaborate themed costumes, often impersonating historical or theatrical figures, and the 1836 series captured one of the major late-Tenpō stagings of this event. The print measures the standard vertical ōban format as a woodblock print in ink and color on paper (nishiki-e), and the Met's holding is part of a 2020 acquisition that brought a focused group of Shigeharu Shimanouchi prints into the museum's collection. The series belongs to the small but important sub-genre of Osaka kamigata-e that documented the pleasure-quarter culture alongside the theatrical stage, and Shigeharu's contributions to the project capture the cross-traffic between the actor and courtesan worlds that defined Osaka popular culture in the 1830s.