The Actor Yamashita Kinsaku holding a puppet of the Empress in the play "Diary Kept on a Journey by Sea to Izu (Funadama Izu Nikki)," performed at the Nakamura Theater in the first month, 1725

The Actor Yamashita Kinsaku holding a puppet of the Empress in the play Diary Kept on a Journey by Sea to Izu (Funadama Izu Nikki), performed at the Nakamura Theater in the first month, 1725, documents a Soga-season production at the Nakamuraza in which the leading onnagata of his generation appeared in a disguised role manipulating a puppet figure. Yamashita Kinsaku I rose to prominence in Kyoto and Edo in the first decades of the eighteenth century and remained among the leading female-role specialists of the Kyoho era, his career intersecting with the late production of the Torii school's founding generation. The role of the kugutsumawashi or itinerant puppeteer was a character type the kabuki repertoire used for moments of comic display and concealed identity, and the puppet-empress sequence allowed the onnagata to demonstrate the technical skill of articulating a smaller figure while remaining the visual focus of the scene. Torii Kiyonobu I, founder of the Torii school of yakusha-e, draws the standing figure with the puppet held aloft in the disciplined bold contour he had codified for sumizuri-e production, the line carrying the principal expressive weight of the design against the lightly inked ground. The hosoban or wide-bordered tate-e format frames the figure full-length, with patterned costume motifs and the small puppet figure supplying the principal visual interest in the absence of an elaborated setting. The Funadama Izu Nikki narrative belongs to the broader Izu nikki cycle that drew on classical poetic geography for its kabuki adaptations, and the first-month production at the Nakamuraza fell within the standard Soga-vendetta rotation that the three licensed Edo theaters observed each New Year. As founder of the Torii yakusha-e tradition, Kiyonobu produced such commemorative portraits in direct service to the kabuki houses. The Art Institute of Chicago preserves this impression (source_url https://www.artic.edu/artworks/19247) as a record of the puppeteer disguise at the height of Kyoho-era Edo onnagata performance.