Tōshūsai Sharaku appeared in May 1794, produced a hundred and forty-some prints of kabuki actors over ten months, and then vanished without a trace. No one knows who he was. His publisher, Tsutaya Jūzaburō, listed him as a Noh actor from the province of Awa — which may have been a fiction designed to protect his identity or to lend him an air of refined mystery. Despite enormous scholarly effort over two centuries, the question of Sharaku’s identity remains genuinely open.
What is not in question is the character of the work. Sharaku’s actor portraits are unlike anything else in the ukiyo-e tradition. Where other artists depicted kabuki performers in their most celebrated poses, glamorized and idealized, Sharaku seems to have looked at the actors themselves — at the exertion and effort behind the role, at the sweat and strain of performance. His faces are extreme: exaggerated, almost caricatured, yet unmistakably specific. The eyes are too large, the mouths pulled wide in expressions of menace or cunning or anguish. The hands are powerful and articulate.
His prints were produced on a mica background, which gave them a shimmering, slightly unreal quality — the figures seem lit from within or from behind, floating against a dark iridescence. This was an expensive technique, and Tsutaya invested heavily in it, apparently betting that the novelty of Sharaku’s vision would find an audience. It didn’t, quite. Contemporary reviews were mixed; some critics found the portraits ugly, too harsh, too honest. The prints did not sell as well as expected.
And then Sharaku stopped. His final prints, from early 1795, show a marked change in style — softer, less confrontational, more conventionally flattering — as if he or his publisher had concluded that the experiment needed to be moderated. Shortly afterward, nothing.
The mystery of Sharaku is one of art history’s great unsolved puzzles, and perhaps that is fitting. The prints themselves project a quality of concealment: faces caught in moments of extreme expression, revealing and hiding simultaneously. Whoever was looking through that lens knew something about masks.