"Sharaku"

Sharaku, who came into sudden prominence, painted a number of ukiyoe in a short period and suddenly disappeared. Owing to the scarcity of historical material and literature concerning Sharaku, this mysterious ukiyoe painter has been investigated by numerous scholars and intellectuals for a long time.

Sharaku left 144 ukiyoe paintings, which were all painted in 10 months. It means that he painted one ukiyoe painting per two days. Even Utamaro Kitagawa who is one of the famous ukiyoe painters, took 10 years to paint 140 ukiyoe pictures. Sharaku's pace in which he produced the paintings was nothing short of miraculous. However, Sharaku's ukiyoe that portrayed actors with bold deformation were not evaluated highly among the actors of those days and were not in high demand. In 1910, Sharaku came into the light by the announcement of monograph written by a German scholar, Julius Kurth, who wrote very highly of Sharaku's work. Since then the research of Sharaku was reviewed more in detail in Japan.

A headman of Kanda area in Edo (Tokyo) named Gesshin Saito wrote in his supplementary ukiyoe handbook that Sharaku was a noh actor named Jurobei Saito. However, as the research progressed, the existence itself of Jurobei Saito had become doubtful. A noh actor, usually of a samurai rank then, would have documents proving it's origin, the name of Jurobei Saito was not identified even in a directory. Therefore, numerous hypothesis and opinions have come out for a while who Sharaku is, such as an anonymous prominent ukiyoe painter, or a publisher Juzaburo Tsutaya, or Sharaku is the name of ukiyoe project produced by groups of ukiyoe painter, etc.

However in recent years, the existence of Jurobei Saito was recognized in ancient documents that were discovered in Saitama, which coincide with the record of Sharaku in Edo era. Finally, after a long detour, Sharaku as Jurobe Saito hypothesis seems to be the correct history.