The actors Nakamura Fukusuke I as Matsugae Matonosuke and Ichikawa Komazo VII as Nikki Danjo in the play "Konoshita Kage Masago no Datezome," performed at the Ichimura Theater in the ninth month, 1855

The actors Nakamura Fukusuke I as Matsugae Matonosuke and Ichikawa Komazo VII as Nikki Danjo, dated 1855, is a yakusha-e woodblock print by Utagawa Toyokuni held by the Art Institute of Chicago. The sheet records a performance of Konoshita Kage Masago no Datezome, a kabuki adaptation of the Date sodo, the famous Sendai succession disturbance, staged at the Ichimura Theater in the ninth month of 1855. Nikki Danjo, the treacherous villain of the cycle, is paired here with the loyalist Matsugae Matonosuke in a confrontation that Edo audiences would have recognized from countless retellings of the Date sodo on stage. Toyokuni's design uses the strong outlines, theatrical poses, and dense costume patterning that define late Edo ukiyo-e yakusha-e under the Utagawa school. By 1855 the print market was saturated with such theatrical commemoratives, and Toyokuni's studio satisfied demand by tying each design tightly to a documented production, complete with role names, theater, and date in the cartouches. The Art Institute of Chicago preserves the print with this full theatrical attribution, which allows researchers to cross-reference it with theatrical chronologies of the Ichimura-za. Within Toyokuni's oeuvre the design illustrates the Utagawa workshop's reliance on dependable, named bills of performance, and within the broader Edo ukiyo-e tradition it shows how the actor print continued to function as an indispensable companion to kabuki spectatorship even in the last decade before the Meiji transformation.