The Actor Arashi Koroku IV in the Final Farewell Performance of His Career (Shōgai onagori kyōgen) as the Female Bandit Hotei Oichi

Held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art (https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/843994), this 1826 yakusha-e by Shunkosai Hokushu shows Arashi Koroku IV in the role of the female bandit Hotei Oichi in his final farewell performance (Shogai onagori kyogen). The shogai onagori kyogen, literally the farewell performance of a lifetime, marked the formal retirement of a senior actor from the kabuki stage, and the production was attended by both the actor's regular audience and the broader theatergoing public as a major social occasion in the Kamigata theatrical calendar. Arashi Koroku IV, a leading onnagata of the Kamigata stage across the late Bunka and early Bunsei eras, here appears in the female-bandit role of Hotei Oichi, the akuba or wicked-woman type whose moral ambivalence and physical aggression placed her at the most theatrically demanding end of the onnagata repertoire. The akuba role allowed female-role specialists to display a register quite distinct from the courtesan, princess, and dutiful-wife conventions that dominated their standard repertoire, with the loosened hair, the prominent kiseru pipe, and the disordered robe signaling the character's outsider status. Hokushu renders Koroku IV with the personal-likeness quality that defined mature Kamigata-e yakusha-e, the actor's distinctive features preserved beneath the role's makeup and the specific costume conventions of the female-bandit type rendered with documentary attention. The single-figure half-length oban composition is in Hokushu's standard mature format, with the figure isolated against a plain ground to focus attention on facial expression and the iconographic markers of the akuba role. The kamigata-e workshop tradition of Osaka, distinct from Edo ukiyo-e in its emphasis on individual likeness and its more restrained color palette, here finds one of its specialized applications in the farewell-performance commemorative subgenre. The Metropolitan impression preserves the careful color registration of premium Osaka workshop output. As a documentary record of a major Kamigata onnagata's career-closing performance, the print stands as both portrait and historical witness.