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

Miidera is a Meiji woodblock print by Tsukioka Kogyo from his series One Hundred No Dramas (Nogaku hyakuban), dated 1893 in the records of the Art Institute of Chicago. The play Miidera, set at the famous temple of the same name, follows a mother whose grief over a lost child carries her into a state of inspired imbalance under the temple's moonlit bell. Kogyo's print honors that emotional charge through the disciplined vocabulary of noh-e: the central figure stands in stage costume against a restrained ground, robe and mask rendered with precise line and carefully balanced color, while the surrounding space is pared back so the actor's stance and the iconic bell carry the play's mood. Pupil of Tsukioka Yoshitoshi and Ogata Gekko, Kogyo developed a noh-e style that combined [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e) draftsmanship with the meditative restraint required by classical theater, and Miidera demonstrates that synthesis convincingly. The Nogaku hyakuban series, conceived alongside Nogaku Zue, gave Kogyo the scope to treat the noh repertoire as a coherent visual archive of one hundred plays. The Art Institute of Chicago documents the impression at https://www.artic.edu/artworks/154683, placing it within a major museum holding of Kogyo's noh prints. For collectors, Miidera is a particularly resonant example of how Tsukioka Kogyo turned one of the noh stage's most beloved emotional plays into a refined Meiji woodblock print.