Ko no Morono (Taka no Mronao) in the Play Chushingura

This 1860s color woodblock print by Utagawa Kunisada depicts the villain Ko no Moronao (also Romanized Taka no Moronao) from the play "Kanadehon Chushingura" (The Treasury of Loyal Retainers), Edo theater's most beloved historical drama and Japan's national tale of samurai revenge. The Chushingura cycle dramatizes the historical Ako vendetta of 1701-1703, in which forty-seven masterless samurai avenged their lord Asano Naganori's forced suicide by killing the courtier who had provoked him, the historical Kira Yoshinaka, fictionalized on stage as the haughty Moronao. Moronao is one of kabuki's great villain roles, an aristocratic bully whose mistreatment of the play's hero Enya Hangan sets the entire vendetta in motion. Kunisada designed Chushingura prints across his career; this 1860s example dates from his late Toyokuni III period, when his palette featured saturated reds (including newly imported aniline pigments) and his villainous figures were rendered with intensified theatricality. The print likely shows Moronao in his characteristic robes of court office, with the cold, calculating expression for which the role is famous. As part of the Art Institute of Chicago's extensive Chushingura holdings, the print sits within a documentary record of how successive generations of Edo and Meiji actors interpreted the same canonical roles, with Kunisada's body of work supplying many of the most widely circulated images.