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

Kokaji, designed by Tsukioka Kōgyo in 1893 for Pictures of No Performances (Nōgaku Zue), depicts one of the most theatrically vivid plays in the Noh repertoire. The sword-smith Sanjō Kokaji Munechika, commanded by the emperor to forge a blade, prays to the deity Inari for a worthy assistant; a child-acolyte appears and is ultimately revealed as the fox-spirit of the shrine, who pounds the steel beside him in a dramatic finale. Kōgyo translates this story into a print of contained energy, the costume and pose of the spirit-figure rendered with the precision his Noh prints achieved, the open ground of the composition standing in for the bare cedar back wall of the stage. As one of the leading designers of Meiji ukiyo-e who built his career around the classical stage, Kōgyo treated the demonic and divine roles of Noh with the same documentary care he brought to the women and warriors, and Kokaji's blend of solemnity and supernatural performance suited his temperament. His training under Tsukioka Yoshitoshi and Ogata Gekkō equipped him for the play's combination of action and ritual, and Nōgaku Zue would feed material into his later Nōga Taikan, which gathered his surveys into the most comprehensive visual record of Noh assembled in the polychrome woodblock medium. The Art Institute of Chicago retains this Kokaji among its late nineteenth-century Japanese prints, where it preserves one of the form's most popular pieces in Kōgyo's exacting interpretation.