The Actors Sanogawa Ichimatsu I as Soga no Goro and Ikushima Daikichi II as Kewaizaka no Shosho in the play "Monzukushi Nagoya Soga," performed at the Ichimura Theater in the first month, 1748

The Actors Sanogawa Ichimatsu I as Soga no Goro and Ikushima Daikichi II as Kewaizaka no Shosho in the play Monzukushi Nagoya Soga, performed at the Ichimura Theater in the first month, 1748, documents the New Year Soga programme at the Ichimuraza for the 1748 theatrical year. The first-month slot at each of the three licensed Edo theatres was reserved for Soga-mono drama, the perennial dramatizations of the twelfth-century vendetta of the Soga brothers Juro and Goro that opened the kabuki calendar's most lucrative season. The 1748 date situates the print firmly within the Kiyomasu II generation of the Torii signature, carried on after the death of the first Kiyomasu around 1722, with the Art Institute of Chicago preserving the impression under the umbrella attribution to Torii Kiyomasu (source_url https://www.artic.edu/artworks/19383). Sanogawa Ichimatsu I, whose name would later attach to the celebrated checkered ichimatsu textile pattern that became a perennial fixture of Edo design, here takes the role of Soga no Goro Tokimune, the younger and more violent of the avenging brothers, while Ikushima Daikichi II plays his courtesan-lover Kewaizaka no Shosho. The pairing of avenger and his beloved was a fixed compositional convention of Soga-cycle dual portraits, allowing audiences to read the entire emotional architecture of the vendetta into a single sheet. The Torii workshop's bold contour line, descended from the hyotan-ashi gourd-leg and mimizu-gaki earthworm-line stylisations developed in the first Kiyomasu's tan-e and sumizuri-e, gave Goro his aragoto weight while the more restrained female-role contour articulated the Shosho's onnagata grace. The hosoban format concentrates attention on the paired figures, with patterned costume motifs supplying the principal visual interest of the design.