Forget dogs playing poker — these are storm-gods playing go. On the left, red-skinned and wild-haired, hunches Raijin, the god of thunder, the horned demon-deity who beats his ring of drums to roll thunder across the sky. Facing him, green-skinned and just as fierce, crouches Fūjin, the god of wind, who looses the gales and typhoons from the great bag he hauls on his shoulders. These two are the oldest double-act in Japanese art — the paired forces of the tempest, thunder and wind, the raw chaos of a storm given two grimacing faces. Tawaraya Sōtatsu made them immortal on his famous gold screens; every Japanese knows them as the guardians glowering from the great gate at Asakusa.

And here they are, the cosmic wrecking crew, with their world-shaking instruments set aside — Raijin's swirl-marked thunder-drums parked up in the corner, Fūjin's wind-bag dumped beside him — so they can bend over a quiet board game and sweat on their next move. That's the whole gag, and it's a good one: the two most destructive beings in the heavens, the pair you're meant to fear, reduced to a couple of blokes locked in a tense, brainy game of territory, too absorbed to make a storm. Raijin, incidentally, is the one Japanese parents still invoke when they tell kids to cover their belly-buttons in a thunderstorm, lest he snatch them — so him going cross-eyed over a go board is a fair comedown.

The hand behind it belongs to Kawanabe Kyōsai, one of the great wild talents of the nineteenth century — a man they nicknamed the gaki, the "demon of painting," for his ferocious energy and bottomless output. He trained first, as a boy, under Utagawa Kuniyoshi, then in the disciplined Kanō school, and fused the two into something all his own: ukiyo-e vitality wearing classical armour. He drank heroically, painted drunk and spectacularly, and was jailed more than once for caricatures that needled the authorities. Demons, ghosts, skeletons and gods caught doing very human, very daft things were his signature — and this go match is about as Kyōsai as it gets.

Raijin (雷神, God of Thunder) and Fūjin (風神, God of Wind) playing go (碁).

Kawanabe Kyōsai (河鍋暁斎, 1831-1889)