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

Tsukioka Kogyo's Kinuta, from the series One Hundred No Dramas (Nogaku hyakuban), is a Meiji woodblock print dated 1893 and held in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. The print illustrates a scene from the noh play Kinuta, one of the masterworks of the third-category women's plays, in which the wife of a man who has been long absent from home beats cloth on a fulling block at autumn nightfall and dies of grief before his return. The play unfolds across two acts, the second of which shows her vengeful ghost recounting the labour and the longing of the kinuta. Kogyo's noh-e composition presents the figure of the wife, or her ghost, in the patterned costume and mask of the role, holding the still posture of the moment of beating the cloth or the moment of revelation. Kogyo had trained under Tsukioka Yoshitoshi in the strict figure drawing of the late [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e) tradition, and the discipline of that line carries through into his treatment of one of the most demanding plays in the repertoire. The Nogaku Hyakuban series, projected as a survey of one hundred noh dramas, supplied the foundation for the more thorough Nogaku Zue project he would pursue across the rest of the decade. The carving translates the textile patterns into precise blocks of pigment, and the printing maintains the muted ground appropriate to performance documentation. Documentation for this impression appears in the Art Institute of Chicago's online catalogue.