The demon who drums the storms into existence. Raijin is chaos given form - red skin mottled and textured like living lightning, muscular limbs twisted in supernatural motion, clawed hands and feet ready to strike. He doesn't ask permission from heaven. He just makes the sky crack open.

Hokusai captures him mid-flight, tumbling through dark clouds of his own making, his body coiling and uncoiling with kinetic energy. Every muscle is defined, every joint bent at impossible angles. This isn't the decorative thunder god of temple paintings - this is raw atmospheric fury, the moment before lightning splits a tree, the sound that makes your chest compress. Raijin's expression is fierce, almost gleeful, like he enjoys the chaos he creates. Those swirling clouds around him could be storm itself or the drums he strikes - Hokusai blurs the line between deity and weather.

Hokusai painted this in 1847, late in his life when he'd already revolutionized ukiyo-e with The Great Wave and Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji. By then he was chasing something beyond technical mastery - trying to capture the essential spirit of his subjects. Here he shows Raijin not as mythology sanitized for worship, but as primal force barely contained in demon flesh.

Raijin (雷神, The Thunder God), from the hanging scroll Raijin-zu (雷神図) 1847.

Katsushika Hokusai (葛飾北斎, 1760-1849)