The Actors Segawa Kikunojo II as Ohatsu and Ichikawa Yaozo II as her lover Tokubei in the play "Yoni Osaka Nitsui no Meoto," performed at the Ichimura Theater in the second month, 1767

Torii Kiyomitsu portrays Segawa Kikunojo II as Ohatsu and Ichikawa Yaozo II as her lover Tokubei in Yoni Osaka Nitsui no Meoto, performed at the Ichimura-za in the second month of 1767. The Ohatsu-Tokubei narrative - derived from the 1703 shinju (love-suicide) play Sonezaki Shinju by Chikamatsu Monzaemon, a foundational text of the early Edo theatre - was one of the most-staged tragic plots in the kabuki repertoire across the eighteenth century. Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653-1725), the foremost Japanese dramatist of his generation, had based Sonezaki Shinju on a real shinju incident of 1703 in Osaka, in which the soy-sauce merchant's clerk Tokubei and the courtesan Ohatsu of the Tenma district committed double-suicide in the woods of the Sonezaki shrine. Chikamatsu's play, originally written for the puppet theatre (joruri), was rapidly adapted for kabuki and supplied the template for an entire genre of subsequent shinju plays. The play's emotional intensity and contemporary subject matter made it the foundational example of the sewamono (domestic-contemporary) kabuki genre. Kiyomitsu's print documents one of the many later Edo restagings of the Ohatsu-Tokubei material, with Segawa Kikunojo II - the leading onnagata of the period - taking the female lead and Ichikawa Yaozo II of the Ichikawa family as her tragic lover. The hosoban benizuri-e is held at the Art Institute of Chicago, where it forms part of the museum's large holding of Torii-school yakusha-e.