The Actor Sanjo Kantaro II as Oshichi in the play "Nanakusa Fukki Soga," performed at the Ichimura Theater in the first month, 1718

Sanjo Kantaro II, one of the leading onnagata of early eighteenth-century Edo kabuki, is shown by Torii Kiyomasu II as the heroine Oshichi in the play Nanakusa Fukki Soga, performed at the Ichimura-za in the first month of 1718. The Soga vengeance cycle was the single most-staged dramatic framework in Edo kabuki across the eighteenth century, dramatising the historical revenge taken by the Soga brothers - Soga no Sukenari and Soga no Tokimune - against their father's killer Kudo Suketsune. The first-month New Year's production at each of the licensed Edo theatres traditionally drew on the Soga material, with each theatre producing its own version of a Soga play for the opening of the theatrical season. Nanakusa Fukki Soga ('The Spring Revival Soga of the Seven Herbs') was one of the many such productions, the title referring both to the seven aromatic herbs traditionally eaten at New Year and to the auspicious cyclical revival the festival celebrated. Oshichi - the famous greengrocer's daughter Yaoya Oshichi, executed in 1683 at the age of sixteen for the arson she committed in order to be reunited with the temple acolyte she had fallen in love with during a refugee period - had become by the early eighteenth century one of the great tragic heroines of the Edo dramatic imagination, her story incorporated into countless plays and remembered in the names of actors and brothels. The pairing of the Oshichi figure with the Soga revenge cycle was an elaborate Edo theatrical conceit. The hosoban urushi-e print is dated 1718 and is held at the Art Institute of Chicago.