Earlier tonight, for a break, I proofread some pages of a book titled Chats on Japanese prints by Arthur Davison Ficke that will eventually end up on Project Gutenberg. It's been unexpectedly fun, in part because random bits of Edgar Allan Poe-esque poetry keep interrupting the flow of academic discourt, but ACK,talk about stumbling into a plot-warren teeming with Harudakian plotbunnies. There's this 18th-century artist named Sharaku, see, about whom not very much is known except that he was also a Noh actor and that he was a bit of a maverick.

My initial impulse would be to create a docudrama about him, starring Yoshizumi, but then this bit (quoting at length from a 1910 source) made me think of a potentially nastier version of Sawa:

"Brooding spirit that he was, he, an Edipus, approached venturously to the Sphinx of passion that peers forth from the faces of men. Uncanny powers lurked in the grotesque furrows and demoniac grimaces of his Noh-masks, but nothing little or shallow--nay, in spite of all grotesqueness, only the significant and symbolic. And then he looked down from his buskined height upon the popular actors--bombastic barn-stormers--greasy low-comedians--louts from nowhere, as the illustrious Harunobu had called them--performers who brought before their gaping audience not, as did he, august things in strangely wonderful guise, but often things far too human in strutting stage-pomp. He looked upon them, a guild not only despised but sometimes even outlawed--a guild that stood on the same plane as the idiotic profession of the wrestler,--a class whose vulgar faces could not hide their swaggering gutter-vanity and their cringing lust for applause behind even the red paint of the ferocious warrior-rôle or the corpse-coloured rice-powder used when aping women. And if we see him thus, we shall understand that this man, as a painter of actors, must eventually become a pitiless satirist."

And this made me think of Mochimune:

It was therefore with the colossal and tragic gestures of the Noh-dance in his soul, the distorted and monumental intensity of the Noh-masks in his eyes, and the contempt and irony of the Noh-performer for the common actor in his heart, that Sharaku, coming to Yedo, took up his terrible brush to depict the Yedo actors as he saw them. The resulting series of portraits is surely one of the supreme examples of graphic characterization and devastating contempt that the world has ever seen. ... The dramatic force, the histrionic illusion of his pictures abates no jot; but beyond it, disturbing lights and movements are lurking. The mighty rôle towers like a shadow before us in its full dramatic sweep; but from the depths of the shadow peers with stealthy glance the indwelling personality of the actor--like a jackal's eyes seen suddenly in a king's tomb. This contradiction--this complex of two utterly antagonistic forces--is one of the miracles of Sharaku's genius: it is an antinomy which he resolves sufficiently to produce an equilibrium, but not enough to take from these portraits the insoluble mystery of two spirits, the tangle of two meanings, the explosive and inscrutable life that makes them unforgettable.

Thus the sweeping rhetoric of the stately rôle and the sudden naturalistic cry of the discovered actor's soul meet in a discord unique, subtly calculated, magnificent, and harrowing. Sharaku pierced deep into the hearts of his sitters to grasp the weak, the grotesque, the pathetic, the tragic; he appraised the lust, the horror, the vacuity that was there, and these qualities he dragged out to the light through the avenues by which he had entered--through the eyes, the lips, the hands--tearing these gates into terrible and distorted breaches eloquent of the booty that had been forced through them. No portraits so blasting as his have ever been created by another; no other hand has so devastatingly shattered the conventional contours of faces to reshape them into the awful images of their own hidden potentialities.