Page 392 - Edo: Art in Japan, 1615–1868

look so much alike that one can hardly pretend to see pronounced differences of individual expression

or emotion, though subtleties of stylistic nuance do occur from one image to the next. If pressed on the
issue, one might conclude that facial features are of less consequence to the artist than the set of her
hair or the design of her garments. One suspects Utamaro was playing a game with his audience, daring
them to superimpose their own psychological interpretation onto his evocative images. Here, for instance,
the artist has described this women as the "fancy-free" type. Timothy Clark's translation puts the term
in the Edo context — the young woman is "fickle" or "promiscuous" and at the same time a bit "showy." 24
Her deflected glance, state of dishabille, and casually appointed hair contribute to the impression of a
fancy-free type or a happy-go-lucky courtesan.
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S H A R A K U ' S Whereas Utamaro focused on beauty prints, the mystery-enshrouded Toshusai Sharaku, who was active
A C T O R S in the Edo art scene for a short year beginning in early 1794, acquired lasting fame for his powerful
bust portraits of actors. The earliest examples were lavishly printed with rich dark mica backgrounds
(cats. 259-264). Sharaku created a sensation with his naturalistic, slightly exaggerated, and sometimes
unflattering portraits. One example shows the male kabuki actor SegawaTomisaburó II as Yadorigi, the

wife of a townsman (cat. 259). The kerchief over the actor's forehead recalls an earlier age, when
young male actors of female roles were required to shave their forelocks and cover their shaven pates.
Such prints recall the fascination with cross-dressing that was central to the allure of kabuki
from its beginnings, when female performers dressed in male costume and brandished swords — in
provocative sexual symbolism, not in self-defense. Whereas male acting troupes were still the norm
in Shakespearean theaters of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England, women eventu-
ally took over female roles there. In contrast, by the mid-seventeenth century in Japan women no longer
performed on kabuki stages, and the onnagata (men who performed female roles) continued to hone
their cross-dressing performances into the modern period. Audiences have always been intrigued by the
way men could portray women, not simply by mimicking the appearance of real women, but by captur-
ing and exaggerating a (socially constructed) ideal of femininity. On the kabuki stage the illusion of
machismo or femininity was enhanced by the use of makeup and costume.
Those accustomed to the highly stylized, masklike images of woman in the bijin tradition will
be caught off guard by the less than flattering features of Sharaku's onnagata. The carefully articulated
nose and squarish outlines of the jowls and jutting jaw run counter to a long tradition of smooth oval
or softly rounded faces of beautiful women. Rather than the usually passive gaze of paintings of women,
the scornful attitude and recalcitrant personality of the actor are conveyed by tiny eyes, arched eyebrows,
and tightly closed lips. The hand does not hold the robe with the frail fingers of a Harunobu maiden
but clenches it with a decidedly masculine strength. All this distortion of ideal femininity becomes more
remarkable when we recall that the lineage of Segawa actors were renowned for their graceful stage
portrayals of onnagata roles, and that most ukiyoe artists adhered to traditional conventions of beauty
prints when depicting them.

Scholarly myths have evolved to explain Sharaku's precipitous disappearance: the satiric por-
trayal of popular actors did not go over well with the public, or the actors themselves took umbrage at
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the less than flattering portraits. Such theories, however, do not properly account for the fact that the
artist seems to have been extremely popular with managers of all three major theaters and that several