Meet the gentleman thief who kept a dragon on a leash. Unryū Kurō is a robber-chief out of Edo popular fiction — but not the common cut-throat kind. His tale belongs to the beloved tradition of the gizoku, the righteous thief: the outlaw with a code, who plunders the powerful and keeps a strange, stubborn honour the law-abiding world around him has mislaid. It's the same romantic streak that runs through Ishikawa Goemon and the "white-wave" bandits of the kabuki stage — the crook you find yourself barracking for. His name says the rest: Unryū, "cloud-dragon," and Kurō, a man's name. Kurō of the Cloud-Dragon. Because this particular thief doesn't just pick locks — he summons dragons.

Here he stands mid-incantation, hands folded into a magician's sign, and the spell answers: a vast pale dragon uncoils out of the dark behind him, wreathed in rolling smoke, red ribbons of sorcerous energy streaming up into the night while its claws and coils frame him like a living cloak. He wears no armour, only a bold indigo robe patterned with an interlocking key-fret — a thief dressed like a dandy, not a warrior, which is exactly the point. He first appeared as the hero of Unryū Kurō Chūtōden, the "Chronicle of Unryū Kurō, the Loyal Thief," a two-volume comic novel of 1858 by the Edo storyteller Rakutei Saiba, and audiences clearly loved him. Here's the delicious catch, though: for all the theatrical swagger of this image, there was never actually a play. No stage version of Unryū Kurō was ever performed. The whole series is a glorious fantasy — favourite actors conjured into the guise of magicians they never got to play, roles dreamed up purely for the pleasure of the spectacle. This is a performance that existed only in ink.

That fond bit of make-believe is the work of Utagawa Kunisada — signing here as Toyokuni III — the most commercially successful print artist of the entire nineteenth century and the undisputed king of the actor portrait. Late in a career of astonishing output, he assembled this run of supernatural showpieces, handing his beloved stars swords, spells, and monsters and turning the theatre into pure dream. The magnificent dragon owes as much to the anonymous genius of the block-cutter, credited on the print as Horimasa of Matsushima, whose knife rendered every scale and whisker of that beast — a reminder that a great print was always a team sport.

The actor Kawarazaki Gonjūrō (河原崎権十郎) as Unryū Kurō (雲龍九郎), from the series Toyokuni kigō kijutsu kurabe (豊国揮毫奇術競, A Contest of Magic Scenes by Toyokuni) 1862.

Utagawa Kunisada (歌川国貞, 1786-1865)