The Actors Otani Hiroji II as Kawazu Saburo and Nakamura Sukegoro I as Matano Goro in the play "Kashiwa ga Toge Kichirei no Sumo," performed at the Ichimura Theater in the eleventh month, 1755

The Actors Otani Hiroji II as Kawazu Saburo and Nakamura Sukegoro I as Matano Goro in the play Kashiwa ga Toge Kichirei no Sumo, performed at the Ichimura Theater in the eleventh month, 1755, documents the kaomise opening of the 1755-56 theatrical year at the Ichimuraza, the annual season at which the three licensed Edo theaters introduced their new troupe rosters. The play stages the legendary sumo match between Kawazu Saburo Sukeyasu and Matano no Goro Kagehisa, the wrestling encounter that occurred during the hunting expedition of Minamoto no Yoritomo and that supplied later kabuki with one of its enduring set-piece confrontations. Otani Hiroji II, drawn from the Otani aragoto specialist line, appears as the heroic Kawazu, while Nakamura Sukegoro I takes the role of the antagonist Matano. Torii Kiyomitsu I, then leading the third-generation Torii workshop, works here 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 an intermediate stage between the earlier hand-colored tan-e and beni-e sheets of the founding Torii generation and the full-color nishiki-e revolution of the 1760s. Kiyomitsu draws the paired figures in the disciplined sumi contour that the Torii circle established for its yakusha-e, the line distinguishing each actor's stance while keeping both figures within the unified register of the design. Patterned costumes signal each character's role through textile motifs, and the hosoban format frames the paired figures in the long ornamental vertical of the standing bodies. The Art Institute of Chicago preserves this impression (source_url https://www.artic.edu/artworks/19852) as a record of the 1755 Ichimuraza kaomise sumo confrontation in the polished benizuri-e idiom.