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These two prints can best be considered together because they were issued, presumably at the close of 1794, in memory of three actors who had died and in special commemoration of Ichikawa Monnosuke II whose death occurred during the eleventh month of that year.
In the print that we place at the left Monnosuke is shown dressed as he had been in a shibaraku rôle, probably that of Saito Musashi-Bō Benkei which he had played with Kanzayemon in 1792, and in the right hand one he is being received in Hades by his former partner, Nakajima Kanzayemon III who here is shown as Emma Dai-Ō, the King of the Dead, this being the part that he had played opposite Monnosuke in the main part of the same performance. Kanzayemon had died in the first month of 1794,—nine months before Monnosuke.
The actor dressed as a woman who is kneeling beside King Emma and pointing toward the new arrival in his realm, is Nakamura Tomijūrō I who had been particularly renowned for his playing of female parts some years before, and who had died in 1782. As Tomijūrō had been at the height of his fame when Monnosuke was young the two prints apparently associate the great actor who had just died with one of the earliest and one of the latest of his distinguished companions.
The coloring of the costume worn by Monnosuke has not been described but we know that in shibaraku parts the heavy over mantle habitually worn was in brick-red and bore the Ichikawa mon in white. In the right-hand sheet Kanzayemon is in pale yellow and lavender with touches of rose. Tomijūrō wears a rose under kimono and an outer kimono of black which bears his mon of arrows in alternate stars of white and lavender.
The print showing Monnosuke is known only in a single, trimmed, impression, now in the Matsukata Collection and formerly in that of M. Vever. We have rephotographed this from the Vignier-Inada Catalogue, number 288, as Rumpf did for his number 1, and as Noguchi has done. The Vignier-Inada Catalogue, almost certainly through a typographical error, lists both of the sheets now under discussion as having
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