Motome-zuka, from the series "One Hundred No Dramas (Nogaku hyakuban)"

Motome-zuka, drawn from Tsukioka Kōgyo's 1893 series One Hundred Noh Dramas (Nōgaku Hyakuban), interprets one of the most poignant plays in the Noh repertoire: the story of Unai-otome, a young woman of Settsu province who, unable to choose between two suitors, threw herself into a river so that neither would lose and was buried in a mound by the road. The Noh play follows a wandering priest who hears her ghost recount her sorrow and the torments she now endures in the afterlife. Kōgyo renders the spectral figure with the restraint that distinguishes his Noh prints, the costume falling in long unbroken lines and the mask catching just enough color to register the woman's tragic dignity. As a leading Meiji ukiyo-e designer who devoted his career to the classical stage, he found in plays such as Motome-zuka the kind of psychologically dense subject that the polychrome woodblock could honor through tonal subtlety rather than dramatic action. Trained under Tsukioka Yoshitoshi and Ogata Gekkō, Kōgyo balanced his teachers' narrative clarity and atmospheric softness, and Nōgaku Hyakuban brought together one hundred plays into a survey that anticipated his later Nōga Taikan. The Art Institute of Chicago preserves this impression of Motome-zuka, where the print does double duty as a record of a single staged moment and as a contribution to the late-Meiji project of consolidating Noh as Japan's classical high art.