Actor Ichikawa Danjūrō IX as Kamakura Gongorō Kagemasa in Shibaraku, from the series The Eighteen Great Kabuki Plays (Kabuki Jūhachi-ban)

Shibaraku ('Wait a Moment') is the most iconic of all the plays in the Kabuki Jūhachi-ban, a bravura piece in which a samurai warrior bursts onto the stage at the last possible moment to halt an execution with the shouted cry 'Shibaraku!' - 'Wait a moment!' Torii Kiyosada portrays Ichikawa Danjūrō IX in the title role of Kamakura Gongorō Kagemasa, the historical Heian-period warrior who in the play arrives to prevent the unjust execution of a noble family. The role demands the most extreme aragoto staging in the entire kabuki repertoire: enormous oversized costume, dramatically exaggerated red kumadori (face-painting) lines, and a series of bold mie (frozen poses) that are the defining moments of Ichikawa-family bravura. The play had originated in the late seventeenth century as one of the founding pieces of Ichikawa Danjūrō I's aragoto style, and was codified within the Kabuki Jūhachi-ban by Danjūrō VII in 1832; by the 1890s, when Kiyosada designed this print, Shibaraku was the single play most closely identified with the Ichikawa name and with the kabuki tradition's continuity into the modern era. Kiyosada's design - in the Torii school's traditional contour-driven vocabulary, with the immense costume and oversized sword filling the vertical extent of the sheet - is held by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The print belongs to 1895, the first year of the Kabuki Jūhachi-ban series and a year of major theatrical commemoration as the Ichikawa house prepared to mark Danjūrō IX's career milestones in the closing decade of the Meiji period.