The Actor Yoshizawa Ayame II as Hotoke Gozen in the play "Onna Monji Heike Monogatari," performed at the Nakamura Theater in the eleventh month, 1748

The Actor Yoshizawa Ayame II as Hotoke Gozen in the play Onna Monji Heike Monogatari, performed at the Nakamura Theater in the eleventh month, 1748, is a Torii-workshop hosoban yakusha-e attributed by the Art Institute of Chicago (https://www.artic.edu/artworks/19295) to Torii Kiyonobu. The 1748 date assigns the sheet to the Kiyonobu II generation of the Torii workshop, the successor designer working under the founding signature through the second quarter of the eighteenth century after Torii Kiyonobu I's death in 1729. Yoshizawa Ayame II was the second holder of the Yoshizawa Ayame name, one of the most prestigious onnagata lineages of the Edo and Kamigata (Kyoto-Osaka) stages; the founding Yoshizawa Ayame I had been venerated as the supreme onnagata of his generation and had codified much of the eighteenth-century theory of female-role performance in his posthumously transmitted essays. Ayame II's appearance in the Edo Nakamura-za was a measure of the inter-regional traffic of senior actors between the Kamigata and Edo stages. Hotoke Gozen is one of the foundational female roles of the Genpei War cycle: in the Heike Monogatari narrative, she is a young shirabyoshi dancer whose displacement of the established favourite Gio at the court of Taira no Kiyomori becomes the occasion for one of the most extended monastic-retirement episodes in the chronicle. The play title Onna Monji Heike Monogatari signals a women's-perspective adaptation (onna monji, literally women's letters or hiragana) of the Heike Monogatari material, a sub-genre that translated the male-warrior chronicle into the dramatic register of the female-role specialists who dominated Edo kabuki. The eleventh-month kaomise slot was the kabuki season opening, the moment at which each Edo theatre presented its newly contracted troupe for the year. The Nakamura-za was one of the three licensed Edo theatres for which the Torii workshop held its exclusive design contract. The hosoban single-figure format and broad contour line remained the workshop's unvarying visual signature. The sheet is held by the Art Institute of Chicago.