Bando Mitsugoro VII as the Mute in "Sannin-Katawa" (Three Disabled Persons).

This [yakusha-e](/glossary/yakusha-e) portrays Bando Mitsugoro VII (1882–1961), a leading kabuki actor of the Taisho era, in the role of the mute in Sannin-Katawa (Three Disabled Persons), a kyogen-derived dance in which three retainers feign disabilities to entertain their lord. The mute's silent communication relies on hand and facial gesture, which Yamamura's compositional approach typically isolates by cropping closely on the figure and setting it against an unmodulated ground. The print would have been produced through a Tokyo publisher with separate keyblocks for line and color, the printer applying [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) gradations by hand to model the actor's face and the textile folds of the costume. The work belongs to Yamamura's series of actor portraits from the early 1920s, which competed in the same [shin-hanga](/glossary/shin-hanga) revival of yakusha-e as Natori Shunsen's portraits and drew on the bold compositional logic of late-Edo masters such as Sharaku while extending it toward a more interior, psychological mode of theatrical characterization.