Ghost

Ghost (Yūrei-zu) is among the small group of figural ink-and-light-colour paintings that Kawakami Tōgai produced in the last decade of his life, alongside the larger body of landscape and copywork that occupied most of his studio practice. The vertical hanging-scroll composition (468 by 940 pixels in the surviving digital reproduction, with a probable original height of roughly one metre) shows a single attenuated female ghost — long unbound hair, white burial robe, hands held loosely at the breast, the lower body dissolving into mist — in the iconographic tradition established in the late Edo period by Maruyama Ōkyo's celebrated Yūrei-zu and elaborated by Shijō and Nanga painters through the nineteenth century.