Actors Representing the Feat of Asahina Breaking the Armer of Soga no Goro (Hirakawa-cho Yamamoto-cho kusazuribiki odori yatai) from the series The Festival of the Sanno Shrine (Sanno go-sairei)

This Torii Kiyonaga sheet, held by the Art Institute of Chicago and dated around 1780, comes from the series The Festival of the Sanno Shrine (Sanno go-sairei) and shows a float on which performers re-enact the famous kusazuri-biki episode from the Soga revenge legends. In that scene the warrior Asahina seizes the kusazuri, or armor skirt, of the young Soga no Goro, and his tugging is celebrated in kabuki and dance as a feat of brute, comic strength. Kiyonaga places the actors on the float of the Hirakawa-cho and Yamamoto-cho wards, the kind of mobile stage (odori yatai) that turned the biennial Sanno festival into a procession of theatrical spectacles through the streets of Edo. As the leading designer of the Torii school, whose long-standing specialty was kabuki signboards, Kiyonaga was singularly equipped to record this overlap of theater and civic display. The composition combines the broad, energetic poses associated with the Torii actor tradition with the calmer, taller proportions of his Edo [bijin-ga](/glossary/bijin-ga), so the figures read as both kabuki characters and recognizable performers. Block printing supports the heavy textiles and bold costume patterns favored on festival floats, while the restrained palette anchors the scene to the wider series. Held in the Art Institute of Chicago, the sheet survives as a documentary record of how Edo's grandest civic festival borrowed theatrical narrative, and how the Torii school used its house style to memorialize the city's most public week of performance.