Torii Tadakiyo — 十八の名作歌舞伎演目 — 薬売り - Japan - 20th century

Artist: Torii Tadakiyo (鳥居忠清), signed at the lower left
Series: 歌舞伎十八番 Kabuki Jūhachiban — "The Eighteen Great Kabuki Plays," black title cartouche across the top
Title: 外郎 Uirō — from the play Uirō Uri (外郎売), "The Medicine Peddler"

Subject: Role and actor named in the left margin: 虎屋東吉 Toraya Tōkichi, played by 九代目市川團十郎 Ichikawa Danjūrō IX. Toraya Tōkichi is the alias under which Soga no Gorō travels disguised as a peddler of uirō medicine from Odawara.

Format: Ōban tate-e, ca. 36 × 24.5 cm
Technique: Nishiki-e (full-colour woodblock print)
Date: 1927 (Shōwa 2)
Signature: 寿雙々 忠清筆 Tadakiyo hitsu, with the artist's red seal below
Publisher: Hasegawa Sumi
Reference: The complete Kabuki Jūhachiban set is documented in the Mokuhankan collection, no. 00032.
--------------------------------------------------------------------

Condition

Very good colour and impression, with the embossing crisp and fully raised. The sheet retains its album backing from the original binding. Please check the images!
---------------------------------------------------------------------

About the print

Uirō Uri is the strangest entry in the Ichikawa canon: a play whose whole point is a speech. Soga no Gorō, hunting the man who killed his father, disguises himself as a travelling medicine seller and talks his way into Kudō Suketsune's presence. To sell the medicine he launches into the uirō-uri no serifu — several minutes of unbroken, accelerating patter, packed with alliteration, place-names and deliberate traps for the tongue, delivered without a breath in the wrong place. It was written for a virtuoso and it is still used today as the standard diction exercise for Japanese actors, announcers and voice students. Almost every professional speaker in Japan has had to get through it at some point.

Tadakiyo catches the moment before the flood. Danjūrō IX has his chin lifted and his eyes turned up and away, mouth set — the peddler sizing up his audience, or the swordsman under the disguise deciding to begin. The costume does the rest of the work: the pale blue zukin wrapped over the head and knotted at the throat, the blue robe scattered with great black-and-gold roundels of Eiraku tsūhō coins, and behind him the peddler's red hat with its gold chrysanthemum and tasselled cords. At the right edge, a second hand lifts one of the little red lacquer medicine boxes.

The design belongs to the Torii line, the family that had supplied kabuki with its signboards and actor prints since the seventeenth century, working here in the taishō-shōwa revival idiom: flat gold ground, saturated blues and vermilions, no shading, and heavy use of blind embossing to give the whites their texture. Danjūrō IX had been dead nearly twenty-five years when this was printed. He was the actor who codified the eighteen plays for the modern stage, and prints like this one served as a record of how he had looked in them — part portrait, part memorial, part standard reference.