Otokonosuke

Otokonosuke depicts the loyal retainer Otokonosuke from the kabuki cycle Meiboku Sendai Hagi, a character celebrated for guarding his young lord against assassination plots within the Date household. He is most often shown in the rat-catching scene — coiled, alert, sword half-drawn — and Mori would likely have isolated the figure against a near-empty ground in his typical manner. The print belongs to the artist's long-running engagement with kabuki aragoto roles, in which exaggerated musculature, splayed costume, and bold makeup translate naturally into his vocabulary of flat color planes and heavy black outline. Mori carved and printed his own blocks in keeping with sosaku-hanga principles, and his Otokonosuke would carry the visible weight of hand-cut line and uneven baren pressure across the washi rather than the mechanical evenness of commercial nishiki-e. The subject ties directly to his Nihonbashi upbringing, where kabuki theater was part of the everyday cultural fabric he revisited in print throughout his career.