Artist: Utagawa Kunisada I / Toyokuni III (歌川国貞, 1786–1865) Series: Tōkaidō gojūsan tsugi no uchi 東海道五十三次之内 — "Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō," universally known as the Yakusha Tōkaidō (Kabuki Actors' Tōkaidō) Station: Yoshiwara (吉原), the fourteenth post town Subject: Konami (小浪), the young bride of Act VIII of Kanadehon Chūshingura — shown on the road in a white travel veil, one hand lifting the cloth from her face. Identified in the literature as the onnagata Iwai Kumesaburō III (later Iwai Hanshirō VIII) Date: Edo period, Kaei 5 (1852) Format: Ōban tate-e, approx. 37 × 25 cm Technique: Nishiki-e (full-colour woodblock) Carver: 彫竹 Hori Take — block-cutter's seal present ---------------------------------------- Paper & condition Very good colours and impression. Centre fold and minor toning; overall very good. The paper is sound and supple with only minor soiling. -------------------------------------------- About the print The Yakusha Tōkaidō of 1852 is, by most reckonings, one of the most commercially successful print series ever published in Japan. Its premise is a merger of the two things Edo buyers wanted most — kabuki stars and the Tōkaidō road — and Kunisada worked the idea so hard that the set, nominally fifty-three designs, expanded past a hundred and fifty, with stations repeated and imaginary way-stops invented to keep it going. Kunisada never walked the route. He worked from Hiroshige's landscapes, lifting the topography and setting his half-length actor portraits in front of it. The pairings of actor, role and place are the game. Here the station is Yoshiwara, at the foot of Mount Fuji, and the role is Konami from the michiyuki of Kanadehon Chūshingura — Act VIII, in which Konami and her mother Tonase make the long journey on foot from Kamakura to Yamashina so that Konami can be married to Rikiya. It is the great travel scene of the Japanese theatre, and putting it at a Tōkaidō station is exactly the kind of pun the series runs on. A companion design showing Tonase at the same station is recorded; the two were conceived as a pair, mother and daughter on the same road.