Utagawa Kunisada (Toyokuni III)

On this page you will find an overview of kabuki plays (and shosagoto or 'dance plays') illustrated by Kunisada. They are listed together with the performing actors and their roles. The plays are sorted by the year of the performance and within the years by alphabetical order. At the moment the list is close to 950 plays, but it’s by far incomplete. Any additional information will be most welcome!

Many thanks to the scholars and students of  the Waseda University and the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum. Without their effort this list would have been impossible to make. Most of the prints published at their web databases are provided with a full description in Japanese. Together with the help of 'Jim Breen's WWWJDIC Japanese-English Dictionary' (http://www.csse.monash. edu.au/~jwb/wwwjdic.html) it was possible to transcribe most of the kanji. And many thanks to Yasu Takano who helped to transcripe a lot of the unread kanji and to clear some of the questionmarks. Also very helpful for this list were the following sources:

·        Samuel L. Leiter, New Kabuki Encyclopedia - A revised Adaption of Kabuki Jiten, Westport, 1997

·        Arendie and Henk Herwig, Heroes of the kabuki stage, Amsterdam, 2004

·        C. Andrew Gerstle, Timothy Clark, Akiko Yano, Kabuki heroes on the Osaka stage, London, 2005.

The titles of the plays are given only as a direct transcription in Japanese. In most cases their translations made little sense to me. I do not want to use any translated titles from other sources in literature. This way I wanted to avoid copying possible errors.
In some cases it has not been possible to find a transcription of the kanji although a hiragana transcprition is provided. I couldn't detect matching Japanese words and decided simply to give the Japanese writing for the title of the play.

The role names are given with kanji/hiragana although I sometimes found more then one way of writing (first part, Kunisada signed kabuki prints). For some names I even found up to ten different variants. However when didn’t find any transcription of the kanji, I decided to stick to the original Japanese writing instead.
When 'x' or 'xx' is used, it means that one or two kanji characters in the transcription are missing. When '?' is used it means that different readings are possible and I choosed the most probable.
All role names are written starting with a capital letter. Name additions (like musume = daugther, nyōbō = wife or others) are started with a small letter.

Don't wonder if one and the same actor is listed for more then one of the roles in a certain play. It's a normal custom in kabuki that an actor plays more than one role in a play.

And also do not wonder if you detect one and the same role in different plays. The titles and the plots of most kabuki plays change with every season (the 'Soga Mono' play for example is known in more then 300 different editions). To make things even more complicated it’s also common practise to mingle plots of two (or occasionally three) plays.

Many thanks to Lucienne Parkan for her tireless help reading "strange" role names.!

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Utagawa Kunisada (Toyokuni III) kabuki plays - Introduction