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

Mitsuyama is a 1893 Meiji woodblock print by Tsukioka Kogyo from his series Pictures of No Performances (Nogaku Zue). The Mitsuyama play, set on the three sacred peaks of Mount Mitsuyama, takes the form of a journey and a vision: a traveling priest encounters at the site the ghosts of three women joined by jealousy and love, whose entangled deaths reflect the spiritual weight of the place. Kogyo, the dominant Meiji woodblock interpreter of noh-e, focuses the composition on the masked shite in characteristic robes, the gesture of the body and the angle of the head positioned exactly as a senior performer would arrange them at the play's central moment. The Art Institute of Chicago, which holds this impression, identifies Nogaku Zue as a major Kogyo series and preserves a substantial group of sheets from it. The print is typical of Kogyo's mature manner: open ground, restrained palette, careful registration of the layered fabrics, and a refusal to externalize the supernatural dimension of the play through theatrical effect. Instead, the supernatural is implied through stillness and through the particular intensity of the mask. For collectors of Meiji theatre prints, Mitsuyama is a representative sheet in the series and a clear demonstration of why Kogyo's noh-e remain the standard visual record of the late-nineteenth-century noh repertoire.