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month of that year under the title of Godairiki Koi No Fūjime, gives the same names to the principal characters, but Koman was represented in it not as Sangobei’s wife but as a geisha, and her relations with Gengobei were so altered that in the course of the action he killed her intentionally instead of killing Oman by mistake. Segawa Kikunōjo III made a conspicuous success playing Koman, the geisha, in that production; but in case the pitfalls lying in wait for cataloguers have not yet become sufficiently evident, we will end this digression by saying that although an Occidental who found a picture of Mrs. Siddons dressed as a bar-maid would not dream of considering her rôle that of Lady Macbeth, anyone who tries to identify the prints of Sharaku through study of the costumes, or to write outlines of the plays in which the actors represented appeared, must delve long and curiously among the dusty records of theatrical history before he commits himself to any conclusion. If he knew only the earlier version of the Gengobei story he would not expect to see Koman dressed as a geisha.
What errors will be found in our work we do not know; nor do we know what new facts, what additional prints may throw fresh light on our conclusions and perhaps reverse some of them. The edifice of scholarship never is finished, there always are new buttresses to be built, old stones to be replaced here and there; but if the text furnished to go with the extraordinary assemblage of master-works of a great print designer which we have gathered for exhibition and reproduction shall prove to have given the students of the future a foundation of more enduring value on which to build, we will consider ourselves rewarded by more than the pleasure we have found in the gathering of these superb prints whose quality will be evident in the exhibition and even will be visible to those who see merely the reproductions that follow with the text of our catalogue.
In the descriptions of each print, whenever a similar one was reproduced by Kurth or by Rumpf or in the lavishly illustrated Vignier-Inada Catalogue, we have given the reference and we have added for the convenience of our Japanese readers, references to reproductions in the books on Sharaku by Noguchi and Nakata; but except in a few special cases in which the reasons for doing so will be apparent, no attempt has been made to list other places where reproductions of the subject under discussion have appeared. Almost all books on Japanese prints and innumerable exhibition and sale catalogues of them that have been issued
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