Actor Nakamura Kumetaro II as Minato, the Wife of Yura Hyogonosuke

This 1794 Toshusai Sharaku okubi-e, in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, portrays the onnagata Nakamura Kumetaro II in the role of Minato, the wife of Yura Hyogonosuke, a samurai-household role drawn from the kabuki repertory of the Kansei era. The sheet belongs to the Edo ukiyo-e production line Sharaku ran with the publisher Tsutaya Juzaburo across his single ten-month spell as a print designer.

Minato is a wife caught up in her husband's loyalty conflicts, and Sharaku records the role through a portrait of quiet, contained anxiety. Kumetaro II's face is drawn with the high-painted brows and small, reddened mouth that the onnagata convention required, but the eyes are downcast and the head tilted gently forward, suggesting an emotion held in private rather than addressed to any character on stage. The artist resists the conventional smoothing of male features into a stylized female mask: the line of the jaw retains its natural weight, and the upper lip and chin show the working anatomy beneath the makeup. The portrait reads as a study of how an experienced onnagata sustains a particular emotional register inside the rigid signs of female role-playing.

The wife's hair is bound in a married woman's style with restrained ornaments rather than the elaborate combs of a courtesan, and the kimono pattern is held to small, repeated motifs that signal household propriety rather than display. Color is restrained, with the keyblock outline and the dark mica background, common to Tsutaya's premium yakusha-e, doing most of the descriptive work.

Within Sharaku's tightly compressed Edo ukiyo-e career, prints of married-woman roles like Minato are comparatively few, which makes this image a particularly useful example of how he extended the okubi-e format beyond courtesan and warrior types into the wider social range of the kabuki stage. The Metropolitan Museum of Art preserves the impression in its Asian Art collection.