Kabuki Actors Onoe Kikugorō III as Shizuka Gozen and Nakamura Utaemon III as Kitsune Tadanobu, in the play Yoshitsune senbon zakura (The Thousand Cherry Trees of Yoshitsune)

This 1830 diptych by Ryūsai Shigeharu, held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art (accession 2011.133a, b), depicts the actors Onoe Kikugorō III as Shizuka Gozen and Nakamura Utaemon III as Kitsune Tadanobu in the play Yoshitsune senbon zakura (The Thousand Cherry Trees of Yoshitsune). The play is one of the three great jōruri-derived classics of the kabuki repertoire, dramatizing the closing years of the twelfth-century Genpei War through a series of intersecting subplots, of which the Kitsune Tadanobu (Fox Tadanobu) scenes are among the most famous: a sacred drum made from a fox's parent skin draws a transformed fox-spirit into the form of Yoshitsune's retainer Tadanobu, who escorts the noblewoman Shizuka Gozen southward in pursuit of the fugitive general. The diptych pairs Kikugorō III's interpretation of Shizuka with Utaemon III's interpretation of the fox-spirit-Tadanobu, with each actor occupying one vertical ōban sheet measuring approximately 36.8 by 24.8 centimeters as a woodblock print in ink and color on paper. The Met's holding is part of a 2011 Friends of Asian Art acquisition that brought a focused selection of Shigeharu prints into the museum's Osaka kamigata-e collection, and the print documents the 10/1830 Osaka production of Yoshitsune senbon zakura at a moment when both Utaemon III and Kikugorō III were at the height of their respective careers.