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

Yūgao, designed by Tsukioka Kōgyo in 1893 for Pictures of No Performances (Nōgaku Zue), draws on the celebrated chapter of the Tale of Genji in which the prince's mysterious lover dies of spirit possession in a deserted house overgrown with the moonflower vines that give her name. The Noh play treats her as a ghost returning to recount the encounter and to seek the priest's prayers, and Kōgyo locates the figure within the play's particular atmosphere of refined melancholy. The costume is rendered with the precise attention to fabric and pattern that distinguished his Noh prints, the long sleeves and layered silks falling against the open ground that his series used to evoke the bare cedar back wall of the actual stage. Within Meiji [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e), Yūgao represented exactly the kind of subject — literary, courtly, atmospheric — that Kōgyo cultivated through his work, and his handling of the figure honors the play's tonal range without overstating it. His training under Tsukioka Yoshitoshi and Ogata Gekkō shaped his ability to draw a literary ghost with both clarity and restraint, and the present sheet would feed material into his later Nōga Taikan, which consolidated his earlier surveys into a comprehensive visual canon for Noh. The Art Institute of Chicago retains this Yūgao among its late nineteenth-century Japanese prints, where it stands as a record of how the Genji material entered the Noh repertoire and how Kōgyo's woodblocks in turn carried that material to a wider public.