Page:The Surviving Works of Sharaku (1939).djvu/215

 to his troops to make his side in popular imagination that of the hero, while all those connected with his opponents, the Abe, were correspondingly thought of as villains. The play is constructed about episodes which probably had little or no basis in fact.

The main action represented in the prints that follow centers around Abe no Sadatō’s attempt to murder Yoshiiye by coming in the disguise of an envoy. Yoshiiye is saved because his place has been taken voluntarily by Gengō Narishige, a formerly disgraced retainer who had been living as a fisherman and calling himself Sazanami Tatsugorō, and whose wife—to add to the complication—was Abe no Sadatō’s sister.

We present first the hero, Yoshiiye.