Actors Ichikawa Danjūrō IV as Yakko Yodohei and Nakamura Utaemon I as the Monk Kiyomizu no Seigen

In a driving nighttime rainstorm Yakko Yodohei, a valiant samurai retainer of the Nijō clan, poses with his right arm around a large stalk of bamboo, holding a sheathed sword in his upraised left hand as he looks down at Monk Seigen, seated at his feet. Danjūrō as Yodohei is shown in a oshimodoshi (押し戻し“push return”) type of aragoto (rough stuff) role, in which he will have entered via the hanamichi holding a thick, young bamboo stalk, which symbolically is used to repulse demons. Here he is shown in a scene just before he is about to kill Seigen, a renegade monk from Kiyomizudera Temple.

Seigen and Yodohei were characters in Act II of the play “Aigo-no-waka Patterned as a Soga Brothers Play for the New Year” (Soga moyō Aigo-no-waka matsu 曽我𧚄愛護若松), which opened at the Nakamuraza Theater the first month of 1769. The complex, almost untranslatable title of the play recalls a seventeenth-century sekkyō-jōruri (puppet play promoting Buddhist morality ) entitled Aigo-no-waka 愛護の若, referring to the name of the protagonist. The old didactic play uses the “pattern” (moyō 𧚄) of a Soga-themed Kabuki play, presented for the New Year, suggested by “young pines” (wakamatsu) in the title.

Contemporary records show that the play opened in the first month, with Danjūrō playing the roles of Kagekiyo (Act I) and Yodohei (Act II), but Utaemon was ill and did not appear in the role of Seigen until the third month. Though in the past, this scene was catalogued as Danjūrō as the Heike general Kagekiyo 景清, a surviving banzuke (Kabuki playbill) of this performance records that this scene is from the finale of Act II, and the famous Ichikawa actor played the role of the samurai retainer Yodohei. This is also confirmed by the handwritten inscription at the bottom of this print, which notes the roles, theatre and date of the performance in the spring of 1769.