The thief who died on his own terms. Torii Matasuke was the kind of antihero that captivated Edo audiences in the late 1840s - a scoundrel, a criminal, but one who refused to go down without making his own choices. In this scene from the kabuki production, he's already fatally wounded, a sharpened bamboo stake jutting from his shoulder, his face gone grey with blood loss and approaching death. But he's still in control.

Kuniyoshi captures the brutal final moment - Matasuke pins down another man beneath him while pressing a bloody knife to his own throat, choosing to end his suffering rather than wait for death to take him. His striped robes are disheveled, his expression fierce despite the pallor creeping across his features. That bamboo stake tells the story of violence already done, the fatal wound that's already claiming him. But Matasuke isn't waiting to die passively. He's making his final choice, controlling how this ends even as life drains away. The composition is stark and intimate, the pinned man forced to witness Matasuke's last act of defiance.

This is from an 1849 kabuki production during a period when Edo theater embraced thieves and criminals as complex protagonists rather than simple villains. Nakamura Utaemon IV brought this doomed scoundrel to life, making audiences sympathize with a man who lived and died outside the law, who kept his agency until the very end.

This is the actor Nakamura Utaemon IV (四代目中村歌右衛門) as Torii Matasuke (鳥居又助), seen here with with Nakayama Bungorô II (二代目中山文五郎) from the kabuki production Omegumi ni Uruo Iwafuji (恵閏初夏藤) 1849.

Utagawa Kuniyoshi (歌川国芳, 1798-1861)