Actor as Tokihira

Designed in 1815, this Utagawa Kunisada yakusha-e presents an Edo kabuki actor in the role of Fujiwara no Tokihira, the historical statesman and villain of the Sugawara play cycle. Tokihira is the political adversary of the deified scholar Sugawara no Michizane and one of the great masculine antagonist roles in kabuki, requiring an aristocratic costume, an elaborately tied wig, and a calm, even sinister stage presence. The role appears most famously in "Sugawara Denju Tenarai Kagami," one of the three great history plays of Edo and Osaka kabuki, and Kunisada's print captures the actor in the formal court robes that signaled Tokihira's rank. As a pupil of Toyokuni I working in the second decade of the nineteenth century, Kunisada was in the early phase of consolidating his own pictorial style for Edo ukiyo-e yakusha-e: the figure here retains some of the relatively youthful elongation he favored before 1820, while the facial likeness already shows the characteristic Kunisada interest in slightly exaggerated brow and jawline. The print is also instructive for what it reveals about the staging conventions of the Sugawara plays, the court colors, the conspicuous courtly headgear, and the controlled, frontal stance that signaled high rank in Edo theatrical iconography. The Metropolitan Museum of Art preserves this impression as a useful document of Kunisada's pre-Toyokuni-III career, demonstrating how early he had already mastered the conventions on which his half-century dominance of yakusha-e would rest.