Hibari-yama, from the series "One Hundred No Dramas (Nogaku hyakuban)"

Hibari-yama (Mount Lark) is one of the rare plays in the Noh repertoire, drawing on a legend of a stepdaughter abandoned on the eponymous mountain by a cruel stepmother and ultimately reunited with her father. Plays of this kind belong to the kazura-mono or san-bamme-mono category — the third of the five-play day-program — which feature elegant, often tragic female figures. Tsukioka Kōgyo's print in Nōgaku Hyaku-ban (One Hundred Noh Dramas) provides one of the few widely accessible visual records of this seldom-staged work. Published by Matsuki Heikichi and held by the Art Institute of Chicago, this color woodblock print is dated by the museum to the 1898-1903 phase of the Nōgaku Hyaku-ban project. The encyclopedic scope of Tsukioka Kōgyo's Noh-print series — including its coverage of rare plays like Hibari-yama — is what has made his Meiji- and Taishō-era prints essential references for both scholars and active performers.