Two forbidden warriors in disguise. These two belong to one of Kuniyoshi's cleverest projects, and the trick behind the series is the real story. Taiheiki eiyūden advertises itself as a gallery of heroes from the Taiheiki, the war chronicle of the 14th-century civil wars — a safely ancient, censor-friendly subject. It's a front. What Kuniyoshi actually painted was the forbidden generation: the warlords of the sixteenth-century Warring States and the rise of Toyotomi Hideyoshi, all of it off-limits under the Tokugawa ban on depicting anyone from 1573 onward. So he dressed the recent dead in medieval names and slipped them past the authorities, fifty smuggled heroes hiding in plain sight.

Horimoto Gidayū Takatoshi and Akashi Ridayū Hidemoto are two of that fifty — Sengoku-era fighting men wearing borrowed Taiheiki identities, each print packed with a dense block of biographical text that Edo readers could decode with a knowing eye. It's Kuniyoshi as quiet subversive: the whole series is an act of coded remembrance, keeping banned heroes alive by the simple expedient of calling them something else.

Akashi Ridayu Hidemoto (明石理太夫秀基), from the series Taiheiki eiyuden (太平記英勇傳, Heroes of Taiheiki) 1848.

Utagawa Kuniyoshi (歌川国芳, 1798-1861)