Boshibari, from the series "Fifty Kyogen Plays (Kyogen gojuban)"

Boshibari, designed by Tsukioka Kōgyo in 1922 for the series Fifty Kyōgen Plays (Kyōgen Gojuban), depicts a beloved comic episode in which a master, fearing that his two servants will raid his sake jar while he is away, ties one to a stick stretched across his back and binds the other's hands behind him, only to return and find them happily drinking together regardless. The play is a staple of the kyōgen repertoire and depends entirely on the physical comedy of the servants improvising drinking strategies despite their restraints, and Kōgyo captures a moment of this resourceful inebriation with the same precision he brought to the more solemn Noh plays. By the time he produced this print, Kōgyo had spent three decades documenting the classical Japanese stage, his earlier Nōgaku Zue and Nōgaku Hyakuban projects of 1893 already absorbed into the encyclopedic Nōga Taikan that confirmed his standing as the foremost designer of Noh prints. Kyōgen Gojuban extended this work to give kyōgen its own dedicated survey rather than treating it as an interlude attached to Noh. Stylistically the sheet shows Kōgyo continuing to refine the idiom he had developed in late Meiji [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e), with clean drawing, controlled color, and the bare-ground composition that mirrors the Noh stage. The Art Institute of Chicago preserves this Boshibari, where the print records both the comic resilience of the play's drunken servants and the late career of an artist who had made the documentation of Japan's classical performing arts his life's work.