Aragato

Aragoto (荒事, "rough business" — Aragato in the artist's transliteration) is the bombastic style of kabuki acting developed by Ichikawa Danjuro I in late seventeenth-century Edo, exemplified by superhuman heroes such as Shibaraku's Kamakura Gongoro and the demon-queller Kagekiyo. Aragoto roles are identified by exaggerated suji-guma kumadori in red lines, heavily padded costumes, mie freeze-poses held at climactic moments, and declamatory delivery. Yamada's print likely isolates a single aragoto figure as portrait or facial study against the paper rather than embedding the actor in a staged scene — consistent with her broader practice of drawing the painted face as primary subject. Lithography on handmade washi suits the visual vocabulary of aragoto: flat fields of saturated colour and graphic linearity translate directly into stone or plate, then onto absorbent paper that holds pigment with a slightly granular surface. The work belongs to the Tokyo-derived kabuki sequence that runs through Yamada's editioned output, drawn from the six years she spent observing performers before returning to the United States.