Kohada Koheiji, from the series "One Hundred Ghost Tales (Hyaku monogatari)"

Kohada Koheiji is an ukiyo-e print by Katsushika Hokusai from the series One Hundred Ghost Tales (Hyaku monogatari), produced around 1826 and held in the Art Institute of Chicago. The series draws on a popular Edo-period parlor entertainment in which guests gathered to recount a hundred eerie stories by candlelight, extinguishing one wick after each tale until the room fell into darkness. Hokusai's print depicts the vengeful spirit of Kohada Koheiji, an actor murdered by his unfaithful wife and her lover, who returns as a skeletal apparition to haunt them. The figure is rendered with anatomical precision unusual for ukiyo-e ghost imagery: a grinning skull with strands of hair, bony hands gripping the edge of a mosquito net, peering into the world of the living. Hokusai's familiarity with Western anatomical illustrations, transmitted through Dutch books in Nagasaki, sharpens the skeletal forms while the flat patterning and bold contour lines remain firmly within the Edo ukiyo-e tradition. The mosquito net introduces a soft veil between viewer and ghost, intensifying the unease. As an Edo ukiyo-e print, the work belongs to a broader nineteenth-century vogue for supernatural subjects fueled by kabuki theater, gothic literature, and the popular kaidan storytelling tradition. The Art Institute of Chicago's impression preserves Hokusai's tonal printing of bone and shadow, allowing the ghost's confrontational stare to register with full theatrical force.