Hagoromo, from the series "One Hundred No Dramas (Nogaku hyakuban)"

Hagoromo (The Feather Robe) is among the most beloved plays in the Noh repertoire, and Tsukioka Kōgyo's depiction in Nōgaku Hyaku-ban (One Hundred Noh Dramas) treats it with appropriate lyricism. The play stages the encounter between a fisherman at Mio-no-Matsubara and a heavenly being (tennin) whose feather robe he has discovered hanging on a pine. After agreeing to return the robe, the celestial woman performs a dance of the Suruga and Tōgaku traditions before ascending back to heaven. Kōgyo isolates the tennin shite at the moment of dance, the trailing sleeves of the feathered robe arrested in mid-motion against the bare cypress of the Noh stage. The print is one of the canonical sheets of the Nōgaku Hyaku-ban series, published by Matsuki Heikichi between 1922 and 1926; this impression, catalogued by the Art Institute of Chicago with the date 1898/1903, reflects the long publication arc and multiple states of Kōgyo's Noh series. Together with Yoshitoshi's late prints and Kōgyo's other Noh work, the sheet exemplifies the documentary fidelity that has made the Nōga Taikan and Nōgaku Hyaku-ban indispensable references for performers and scholars of Noh.