A demon caught in the act of escaping. This is the electric climax of one of Japan's great supernatural tales. Watanabe no Tsuna — the fiercest of the four elite warriors who served the demon-queller Minamoto no Raikō — was ambushed one night at a Kyoto bridge by an ogre, and with a single clean stroke hacked off its arm. He sealed the grisly trophy away and was warned to admit no visitors for seven days. On the last night, his elderly aunt came calling, and dutiful Tsuna let her in. It was the demon, Ibaraki-dōji, wearing a borrowed face.

The instant his guard dropped, the disguise tore away. Kunichika freezes the reveal: the demon mid-transformation, white hair exploding upward, the reclaimed arm clutched to its jaws, its robe flying out behind it in a sheet of blood-red — while Tsuna, a heartbeat too slow, levels his blade at a monster already halfway gone. Autumn maples scatter through the night around them, beauty and horror in the same frame.

The hand behind it is Toyohara Kunichika, the supreme portraitist of the Meiji kabuki stage — a gloriously dissolute character who claimed to have worn out more than a hundred homes and as many wives, and who poured all of that restlessness into blazing, larger-than-life likenesses of the actors he idolised. Here two of the era's greatest, Onoe Kikugorō V and Ichikawa Sadanji I, bring the demon and its hunter to roaring life.

Onoe Kikugorō V (五代目尾上菊五郎) and Ichikawa Sadanji I (初代市川左團次) in the kabuki play Ibaraki (茨木) 1890.

Toyohara Kunichika (豊原国周, 1835-1900)