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

Kirokuda, from Tsukioka Kōgyo's 1922 series Fifty Kyōgen Plays (Kyōgen Gojuban), depicts a kyōgen in which a master sends his servant Tarōkaja to deliver a string of cattle to a relative; on the road, the servant is detoured by a sudden snowstorm and seeks shelter where he is plied with sake. The play turns on the servant's progressive intoxication and the increasingly improvised excuses he offers when he must finally account for his delay. Kōgyo's print captures a single moment of comic dignity from this episode and stages it against the bare ground he used to evoke the Noh stage, focusing attention on costume, prop, and the choreographed stance of the figure. By 1922 he had spent more than three decades devoted to the classical Japanese theater, and Kyōgen Gojuban extended the project he had begun in his 1893 Nōgaku Zue and Nōgaku Hyakuban and consolidated in the encyclopedic Nōga Taikan. The kyōgen series gave the comic form its own dedicated survey, recognizing that even within the larger Noh program kyōgen had its own conventions worth recording. Stylistically the sheet shows Kōgyo's late manner — assured, economical, and tonally restrained — drawing on the lessons of his teachers Tsukioka Yoshitoshi and Ogata Gekkō. The Art Institute of Chicago preserves this Kirokuda, a record of a late career sustained by patient documentation of the classical stage at a moment when other modern Japanese print designers had largely turned to other subjects.