The Actors Ichimura Uzaemon IX as the footman Gunsuke and Sakata Sajuro I as Yamaga no Sashiro in the play "Iro Jogo Mitsugumi Soga," performed at the Ichimura Theater in the first month, 1765

The Actors Ichimura Uzaemon IX as the footman Gunsuke and Sakata Sajuro I as Yamaga no Sashiro in the play Iro Jogo Mitsugumi Soga, performed at the Ichimura Theater in the first month, 1765, documents a New Year Soga-cycle program at the Ichimuraza. The Iro Jogo Mitsugumi Soga belongs to the standard Soga vendetta rotation that the three licensed Edo theaters observed each first month, and the production paired Ichimura Uzaemon IX in the role of the yakko or footman Gunsuke with Sakata Sajuro I as Yamaga no Sashiro. The yakko role allowed leading-male actors to display the swaggering tateyakko bravado of the Edo street-tough tradition, while the Yamaga character belonged to the broader Soga supporting cast. 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 arrived in this very year of 1765 through the work of Suzuki Harunobu and his collaborators, and Kiyomitsu's continued benizuri-e production documents the persistence of the earlier idiom alongside the new technical possibilities. 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 against the lightly inked ground. The hosoban format frames the paired figures in the long ornamental verticals of the standing bodies. The Art Institute of Chicago preserves this impression (source_url https://www.artic.edu/artworks/13674) as a record of the 1765 Ichimuraza first-month Soga program at the transitional moment of mid-1760s Edo print production.