The Actors Sakakiyama Sangoro as the page boy Kichisaburo and Segawa Kikunojo II as Oshichi in the play "Hatsugai Wada no Sakamori," performed at the Nakamura Theater in the first month, 1759

The Actors Sakakiyama Sangoro as the page boy Kichisaburo and Segawa Kikunojo II as Oshichi in the play Hatsugai Wada no Sakamori, performed at the Nakamura Theater in the first month, 1759, documents a New Year program from the early 1759 season at the Nakamuraza in which Segawa Kikunojo II, then approaching the height of his Edo onnagata career, appeared as Oshichi opposite Sakakiyama Sangoro's page boy Kichisaburo. The Yaoya Oshichi narrative of the greengrocer's daughter who set fire to her home to be reunited with her lover had supplied Edo kabuki with one of its enduring sewamono subjects, and the kaomise-period adaptations regularly recast the materials within the year's required Soga-cycle framing. 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 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, and Kiyomitsu was the leading designer of the format during its peak years. Kiyomitsu draws the paired figures with the refined, slightly slender proportions and delicate facial features characteristic of his polished onnagata and wakashugata idiom, the line distinguishing the young male role from the female role through subtle adjustments of contour and stance while maintaining the unified visual register of the design. The hosoban format frames the paired figures, with patterned costume motifs supplying the principal visual interest. The Art Institute of Chicago preserves this impression (source_url https://www.artic.edu/artworks/19892) as a record of the 1759 Nakamuraza Oshichi program in the polished benizuri-e idiom.