The warrior hiding in a farmer's coat. This is a fighter caught mid-disguise — armour concealed beneath a peasant's straw rain-cloak, a farmer's hoe gripped like a weapon, two swords still at his hip, a straw hat and a spray of blooming iris tossed down at his feet. Everything about him says ambush waiting to happen: the soldier passing as a labourer, the hoe about to swing like a blade, the tight-shut mouth of a man a heartbeat from violence. Even the flower is a tell — the iris blooms in early summer, the season of the Boys' Festival, and its Japanese name puns on "martial spirit," so the bloom at his feet is quietly whispering that this is no farmhand.

Kuniyoshi loved this kind of coiled, about-to-spring energy, and he gives the disguised warrior the full treatment, the rustic get-up sharpening the menace underneath rather than softening it.

There's a fitting irony to him, too. He comes from "Heroic Stories of the Taiheiki," the series in which Kuniyoshi smuggled the real warlords of the sixteenth century past the censors — who'd banned depictions of that too-recent age — by hiding them behind altered names and the cover of an older chronicle. The trick worked. It worked so well, in fact, that for this particular warrior it has never been settled who he really was: the mask outlived the man. A soldier disguised as a farmer, painted under a disguised name, his true identity now lost to the very concealment that let him exist on paper at all.

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)