Toyokuni, Utagawa (ill.) / Ichibito, Asakusa, Yakusha awase kagami [A mirror of actors' physiognomies], Edo [Toto], Bunshundo and Yamadaya Sanshiro, Kyowa 4 (1804).

Toyokuni, Utagawa (ill.) / Ichibito, Asakusa

Yakusha awase kagami [A mirror of actors' physiognomies], Edo [Toto], Bunshundo and Yamadaya Sanshiro, Kyowa 4 (1804).

One of the outstanding woodcut books devoted to Kabuki actors

An outstanding and extremely rare actor book: Asakusa Ichibito's "Yakusha awase kagami", illustrated by Utagawa Toyokuni, is one of the finest surviving colour-printed kabuki books of the early nineteenth century. This complete copy is particularly remarkable for its freshness of impression and colour.

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Two volumes, 4to (266 x 181 mm). Vol. I: 11 ff., including blue-printed inside title, 4 pp. preface, and 18 single-page actor portraits. Vol. II: 12 ff., including blue-printed inside title, 15 single-page actor portraits, followed by a single-page poem signed Ichikawa Hakuen (Danjuro V), 4 pp. postscript signed Kankoku, 2 pp. second postscript by Banshundo, final colophon. Bound in traditional fukurotoji style; preserved in cloth chitsu featuring gold-leaf decoration, wanting bone clasps; minor stains and wear to both covers. Light worming, ink slightly faded in a few pages; title slip of first volume largely lost; block-stitching in vol. 2 loose.

The work translates Toyokuni's celebrated half-length actor likenesses into book form, preserving the immediacy and psychological force that made his single-sheet actor prints such a success. The sequence of portraits, set beneath kyoka and against pale grey grounds, turns the volume into a sustained gallery of kabuki physiognomy at the height of Edo theatrical culture.

Issued in 1804, the year of Toyokuni's punishment in the well-known censorship affair connected with theatrical imagery, the book belongs to the mature phase of his engagement with actor portraiture and stands close to the moment when such imagery had reached a particular intensity and public prominence.

A vivid document of kabuki celebrity culture in late Edo Japan. Complete copies in original wrappers are of notable scarcity, and the present survival is additionally distinguished by its preservation in chitsu and by the unusually bright state of the colours.

Provenance: book label "Isseido" to inner chitsu cover; French private collection.

Louise N. Brown, Block Printing and Book Illustration in Japan (London, 1924), p. 155. Hizo Ukiyo-e taikan III, pp. 305-317. Gerstle 2005, 82. Hillier & Smith 1980, 96. Smith 1988, Books 43. Hillier 1987, pl. 103, fig. 376.

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Toyokuni, Utagawa (ill.) / Ichibito, Asakusa

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