Nakamura Noshio II as Konohana, Daughter of Ki no Tsurayuki

Nakamura Noshio II as Konohana, Daughter of Ki no Tsurayuki, dated 1794, belongs to the celebrated first phase of Tōshūsai Sharaku's ten-month career, the May 1794 ōban [yakusha-e](/glossary/yakusha-e) issued by Tsutaya Jūzaburō from the publisher's Edo shop on Tōri Aburachō. Sharaku appeared from nowhere that month, producing twenty-eight bust portraits of actors performing at the three licensed Edo theaters in the kaomise-following season, and the role of Konohana belonged to the production at the Miyako-za in which Nakamura Noshio II, a leading onnagata of the year, appeared as the daughter of the courtier-poet Ki no Tsurayuki. The print sets the half-length figure against the [kirazuri](/glossary/kirazuri) or mica ground that the May 1794 Sharaku portraits made famous, the ground prepared by brushing mica powder over a paste binder so that the sheet's background catches reflected light in a way no flat color block could match. The technique was the most expensive available to Edo publishers, and Tsutaya's willingness to underwrite the kirazuri across an entire series of an unknown designer marks the commercial ambition of the project. Sharaku's onnagata portraits within the May series have been read as gentler than his violent male-role designs, yet the same unsparing observation governs the contour, with the line refusing the conventional sweetening that other yakusha-e designers applied to leading female-role performers. The exaggerated honesty for which Sharaku's portraits became known consists less in caricature than in the refusal of the flattering distance that other [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e) designers maintained from their subjects, with each contour describing an observed face rather than an idealized type. Wikimedia Commons preserves a record of this design (source_url https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q62270893) as part of the standard reference holdings for the May 1794 Sharaku output that secured the artist's later reputation as one of the great yakusha-e portraitists despite a working career of barely ten months.