The Actors Bando Aizo as the courtesan Kewaizaka no Shosho and Ichikawa Raizo I as Soga no Goro in the play "Satsuki Matsu Unohana Soga," performed at the Morita Theater in the fourth month, 1766

The Actors Bando Aizo as the courtesan Kewaizaka no Shosho and Ichikawa Raizo I as Soga no Goro in the play Satsuki Matsu Unohana Soga, performed at the Morita Theater in the fourth month, 1766, documents a Soga-cycle production at the Moritaza in the spring of 1766. The Soga vendetta materials supplied Edo kabuki with its annual New Year programs across all three licensed theaters, and seasonal revivals such as this fourth-month Moritaza presentation extended the cycle's commercial reach across the year. The pairing of Bando Aizo as the courtesan Kewaizaka no Shosho with Ichikawa Raizo I as Soga no Goro Tokimune, the younger of the vendetta brothers, places the production within the romance-strand of the wider Soga repertoire, in which Goro's attachment to the Yoshiwara courtesan Kewaizaka adds erotic interest to the avenging-brother narrative. Torii Kiyomitsu I, third head of the Torii school after Kiyonobu I and Kiyomasu I, here works in the polished benizuri-e mode that defined the school's mid-eighteenth-century output, a two- or three-color printing technique in which delicately registered pink and green pigments were laid over a precisely cut sumi outline. The benizuri-e process represented the immediate stage before the full-color nishiki-e revolution that Suzuki Harunobu had introduced in the previous year of 1765, and Kiyomitsu's continued benizuri-e production documents the persistence of the earlier idiom in the mid-1760s. Kiyomitsu draws the paired figures with the refined, slightly slender proportions and delicate facial features characteristic of his polished hand, with patterned costume motifs supplying the principal visual interest. The hosoban format frames the paired figures, with the long ornamental verticals concentrating attention on the figures against the lightly inked ground. The Art Institute of Chicago preserves this impression (source_url https://www.artic.edu/artworks/19864) as a record of the 1766 Moritaza Soga production in the polished benizuri-e idiom.