Narukami

Narukami is an 1855 woodblock print by Utagawa Kunisada (Toyokuni III), drawn from one of the most famous plays in the kabuki repertoire and a centrepiece of his late yakusha-e production. The play Narukami belongs to the eighteen 'great plays' (kabuki jūhachiban) curated by the Ichikawa Danjūrō family, and centres on the priest Narukami who has trapped the rain-bringing dragon god in a waterfall to revenge himself on the imperial court. The plot turns on his seduction by the court lady Taema-no-Mae, who tricks him into breaking his vows and releasing the dragon; Narukami's subsequent furious transformation is one of the great aragoto set pieces of the Edo stage. Kunisada designs the moment for maximum visual impact: the priest is rendered in the bold red kumadori makeup of aragoto, with exaggerated brows and a clenched mouth, and the body twists in the conventionalised mie pose that compresses dramatic intensity into a single image. As a senior Utagawa-school designer Kunisada had spent decades observing Ichikawa Danjūrō VII and VIII in this role, and his print depends on the close cooperation between the print market and the kabuki theatres of Edo. The mid-1850s palette is dense and saturated, with reds and blacks dominating the figure against a quieter ground, and the surface shows the woodblock printer's skill with overprinted gradations. The Victoria and Albert Museum holds the impression and dates it to 1855, situating the sheet within the late wave of Kunisada's yakusha-e at the close of the Edo period.