Act I (Daijo): Actors Bandō Kamezō as Kō no Moronao and Kataoka Nizaemon as Momonoi Wakasanosuke, from the series The Storehouse of Loyal Retainers, a Primer (Kanadehon chūshingura)

A color ōban woodblock print of 1862 in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, this Act I (Daijo) print pictures Bandō Kamezō as Kō no Moronao and Kataoka Nizaemon as Momonoi Wakasanosuke in the opening act of the classic vendetta drama The Storehouse of Loyal Retainers (Kanadehon chūshingura). The play, first staged as a bunraku puppet drama in 1748 and quickly adapted for kabuki, dramatizes the historical 1701–1703 vendetta of the forty-seven rōnin against the courtier Kira Yoshinaka; in the kabuki version the characters are renamed and the action is displaced to fourteenth-century Kamakura, but the underlying narrative — the lord's forced suicide, the rōnin's vow, the patient preparation, and the climactic raid — remains intact. The Daijo ("grand opening") act stages the original insult: Moronao (the Kira character) confronts and slights Wakasanosuke and his colleagues at Tsurugaoka Hachimangū shrine, setting in motion the chain of events that drives the entire twelve-act drama. Kuniaki II's print belongs to a complete twelve-act series preserved at MFA Boston, with each act represented by a separate sheet — an exceptional survival in a single museum collection.