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

Teika is a Meiji woodblock print of 1893 by Tsukioka Kogyo, issued in his major noh-e series One Hundred No Dramas (Nogaku hyakuban). The play takes its name from the poet Fujiwara no Teika, but its dramatic focus is on Princess Shokushi, whose forbidden love for him is so consuming that after death her spirit is entangled by a vine of teika kazura that has grown over her tomb. The shite appears first as a local woman who guides a traveling priest to the grave, then returns transformed as the bound spirit of the princess herself, dancing a slow, anguished plea for release. Kogyo, who built his reputation on faithful Meiji woodblock representations of the noh repertoire, depicts the masked figure with the patterned brocade robe, fan, and hand positions used in actual performance. The Art Institute of Chicago, which holds this impression, preserves the Nogaku hyakuban project as a key reference for the genre of noh-e. Compared with the documentary breadth of Nogaku Zue, the Hyakuban sheets read as more pictorial, with closer attention to seasonal cues and atmosphere; here the muted palette and spare background evoke the autumn gloom that haunts the play. For collectors of Meiji theatre prints, Teika is among the more poetically charged sheets in Kogyo's output and exemplifies how noh-e can compress a long, layered drama into a single composed image.