The last of a dying breed. This one has no name, and that turns out to be strangely fitting — because it belongs to the moment the entire samurai class was being erased. Yoshitoshi's Records of Light and Darkness at Kagoshima responds to the Satsuma Rebellion of 1877: the last great samurai uprising, when Saigō Takamori — once a hero of the Meiji Restoration he now opposed — led the disaffected warriors of Satsuma against the new imperial government and its army of conscripted commoners armed with modern rifles. It ended at Shiroyama, in Kagoshima, with Saigō dead and the old warrior order finished for good.

That's the weight this unnamed figure carries. He isn't a specific hero from a comfortable distance of centuries; he's a warrior from a war Yoshitoshi himself was living through, drawn as the sword-bearing class made its final, doomed stand against the machinery of the modern state. Within a few years, the topknot, the two swords, the whole apparatus of the samurai would be gone — outlawed, pensioned off, remembered. This warrior stands for all of them: nameless, because by then they were becoming a category rather than a cast of individuals.

It's also, tellingly, a preparatory drawing rather than a finished print — a working sketch, the artist's hand still visible in it. There's something apt about catching the last samurai not in polished colour but in the raw, unfinished line, a class fading out mid-stroke.

A preparatory drawing of a Warrior, from the series Kagoshima meianroku (鹿児島明暗録, Records of Light and Darkness at Kagoshima) c1878.

Tsukioka Yoshitoshi (月岡芳年, 1839-1892)