The Actors Ichikawa Yaozo III as Shiragiku, Ichikawa Danjuro V as the puppeteer Dekurokubei, and Sawamura Sojuro III as Soga no Juro, in the joruri "Shinobukoi Yanagi no Katsura Otoko," performed at the Nakamura Theater in the first month, 1785

Designed for the first-month 1785 production at the Nakamura Theater of the joruri "Shinobukoi Yanagi no Katsura Otoko," this Torii Kiyonaga print presents Ichikawa Yaozo III as Shiragiku, Ichikawa Danjuro V as the puppeteer Dekurokubei, and Sawamura Sojuro III as Soga no Juro. The triad of stars and the joruri framework, with its embedded puppet character, are typical of the elaborate kabuki dance plays of the 1780s, in which the line between actor and puppet was theatrically blurred. As head of the Torii school, Kiyonaga inherited the school's traditional role of supplying kabuki billboards and souvenir prints to the Edo public, but he treats the subject with the same compositional discipline as his Edo bijin-ga. The three figures are arrayed across the sheet in a balanced frieze, costumes drawn in broad calm shapes whose patterns identify each role, and individual likenesses are sustained by the careful inflection of facial features. The Art Institute of Chicago preserves this print, where it joins a substantial body of Kiyonaga theater designs from the mid-1780s. Such sheets functioned as both commemorative souvenirs and promotional material for the theaters and houses depicted, and the present example records a specific staging with sufficient detail of casting and role that it is useful to historians reconstructing kabuki programming at the Nakamura Theater.