Futari Shizuka, from the series "Pictures of No Performances (Nogaku Zue)"

Futari Shizuka, designed by Tsukioka Kōgyo in 1893 for Pictures of No Performances (Nōgaku Zue), depicts a Noh play in which the spirit of the famous shirabyōshi dancer Shizuka Gozen possesses a young woman cutting young greens at Yoshino, so that the dancer and her host appear to perform side by side as twin Shizukas. The play's defining image is this doubling, in which the live and the dead, the present and the historical, share the stage in coordinated movement. Kōgyo captures the moment of paired performance with the precise costume and gesture for which his Noh prints became famous, the figures stationed in the geometry that the choreography prescribes. As a central designer of Meiji [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e) dedicated to the classical stage, he understood that Futari Shizuka would resonate with audiences familiar with both the legend of Shizuka Gozen and the conventions of spirit possession in the Noh repertoire, and he keeps the composition uncluttered so that the eye is free to read the doubling. His training under Tsukioka Yoshitoshi and Ogata Gekkō shows in the print's combination of narrative clarity and tonal restraint. Nōgaku Zue would later feed into his comprehensive Nōga Taikan, but the present sheet belongs to the project's earliest mature phase. The Art Institute of Chicago retains this Futari Shizuka among its Meiji-era holdings, a record of one of Noh's most theatrically inventive plays as registered in the late nineteenth-century polychrome woodblock.