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

Ko no Morono (Taka no Mronao) in the Play Chushingura, recorded by the Art Institute of Chicago with a date of 1786, gives Utagawa Toyokuni's account of the villain whose insult sets the entire revenge narrative of Chushingura in motion. Renamed Ko no Morono (or Moronao) in the play to avoid direct reference to the historical Kira Yoshinaka, the character is a high-ranking official whose abuse of Lord Enya Hangan ultimately drives the latter to commit ritual suicide and his forty-seven retainers to undertake their famous vendetta. Toyokuni's design treats Morono with the visual rhetoric of [yakusha-e](/glossary/yakusha-e) at its most charged: heavy robes, an exaggerated pose, and facial features that emphasize his arrogance and cruelty. As Edo [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e), the print taps into one of the period's most powerful theatrical franchises. Chushingura ran in many versions on the kabuki and joruri stages and was the subject of countless prints in which actors became inseparable from the characters they embodied. Utagawa Toyokuni's role in shaping this iconography was decisive; his actor prints helped establish a vocabulary that later Utagawa designers, including Kunisada, would inherit and extend. The Art Institute of Chicago catalogues the sheet as Toyokuni I, preserving it both as a record of a particular 1780s performance and as one node in the dense network of ukiyo-e prints that built around the Chushingura legend.