The Cleveland Museum of Art has an album of kabuki actor portraits from Osaka. It folds out like an accordion. Each portrait is a small painting on silk, about twenty-two centimetres by eighteen, pasted onto a page, and the page facing it is usually a poem in ink. The museum dates it about 1790 to 1810 and gives the painter as Shōrakusai, who died, the record says, in 1810.

I drew one double page of it at random, 1988.105.z. On the right is a young woman from the shoulders up. Her hair is piled high with a comb, long pins and a spray of blue flowers, and her kimono is red with gold swirls and cherry blossoms. Her upper lip is red and her lower lip is green. On her forehead, just under the hair, sits a small purple cloth.

That cloth is how you know she isn’t a woman. Kabuki actors in women’s roles, the onnagata, were men. In the 1600s they had to shave the front of the head like other adult men, and they covered the shaved part with a purple silk cap. Later they wore wigs, but the purple patch stayed on as a convention, and painters kept putting it in.

Next to the face is a narrow strip of gold-flecked paper with the character’s name written on it. Most of it I could read: 秋月女深雪, Akizuki’s daughter Miyuki. And at the bottom, 曙山, Shozan. A name at the foot of these labels is usually the actor’s poetry name. Actors wrote verse under a second name, and fans knew them by it.

Miyuki is the heroine of the Morning Glory story. She meets a young man by the Uji River, and he writes a poem about a morning glory on her fan. Through a misunderstanding she runs from a marriage to someone else, not knowing the someone else is him under another name. She cries herself blind and makes her living playing the koto under the name Asagao, Morning Glory. He finds her at an inn and can’t tell her who he is. She gets her sight back only at the very end.

Shozan was the poetry name of Sawamura Tanosuke II, an onnagata born in Kyoto in 1788. He was a star in Edo, and he came to the Osaka area to act from late 1813 to early 1815. In the first month of 1814, at the Kado theatre in Osaka, he opened in a new play written for him, Keisei Tsukushi no Tsumagoto. It was the first time the Morning Glory story was staged as kabuki, and he played Miyuki.

So here’s my problem. As far as I can find, there was no Miyuki on the kabuki stage before 1814, and the man named on the label was in Osaka playing her that year. But the album is dated to 1810 at the latest, and so is the death of the man who painted it.

I can think of a few ways this fits. The label might have been added later by someone who guessed. There might have been an earlier staging that the sources I could reach don’t mention. Or the dates on the record are a little early, and the album was made around 1814 or after. I lean towards the last one, because the label is so specific: the right actor, in the right role, in the right city, in the year he played it there. A guess would be unlikely to land on all four. Nothing else on the page argues against it. The green lip is thick safflower rouge, which turns an iridescent green when it’s laid on heavily, and that was a fashion of roughly 1804 to 1830. It doesn’t decide anything, but it fits 1814. But I read this through search summaries, not the books themselves, so it’s a lean and not a finding.

Shozan turns up in the album once more. On another double page, across from a portrait of a different actor, there’s a short poem in ink, and it’s signed 曙山. I can’t read the poem well enough to tell you what it says. But it probably means that in an album of actors’ faces, at least one of the actors wrote on a page himself. That’s what the poetry names were for.

Tanosuke went back to Edo and died there in 1817. He wasn’t yet thirty. The museum’s record for this page calls it “Double-Leaf from Album of Actor Portraits” and says nothing about who is in it. The strip of paper beside his face does: who he was, and who he was playing.