The samurai who treated an arrow like a splinter. Behind the stage-name Horimoto Gidayū stands a real warrior of Japan's bloodiest century — Morimoto Gidayū Hidetora, a retainer who fought in the Japanese invasions of Korea in the 1590s under the fearsome general Katō Kiyomasa. The story that earned him his portrait is a small masterpiece of samurai hard-headedness: in the thick of battle an arrow punched clean through his forearm, and rather than pull back, he coolly asked a comrade to haul the shaft out, then turned and kept fighting. No drama, no fuss — a man who treated a shaft through the arm as an inconvenience to be dealt with and got on with.

Kuniyoshi freezes him in exactly that moment of hard-eyed composure, studying the arrow skewering his own forearm with the mild annoyance of a bloke who's found a nail in his boot. It's the whole samurai ideal of stoic endurance — pain met with a shrug — distilled into a single unbothered glance.

He belongs to one of Kuniyoshi's cleverest projects, "Heroic Stories of the Taiheiki." The title is a decoy. The shogunate had banned artists from portraying the warlords of the recent age of unification, so Kuniyoshi dressed these sixteenth-century fighters in the borrowed name of an older, safely ancient war chronicle and nudged each man's name just off-true to slip past the censors — while every viewer in Edo knew perfectly well who was really being celebrated. "Horimoto" is the wink; Morimoto is the man.

Horimoto Gidayū Takatoshi (堀本儀太夫高利), from the series Taiheiki eiyuden (太平記英勇傳, Heroes of Taiheiki) 1848.

Utagawa Kuniyoshi (歌川国芳, 1798-1861)