from the series One Hundred Pictures by Kyôsai (Kyôsai hyakuzu)

Kyosai's familiarity with ghost imagery — yūrei, the spirits of the restless dead — was extensive and well documented. He sketched such subjects at wakes and in the kabuki theater, where ghost roles (kaidan-mono) were a staple of the summer season. In the Kyōsai hyakuzu series, supernatural figures appear with the same graphic command as his nature studies or historical scenes, their disheveled hair and trailing white robes rendered through precise block-cutting that preserves the spontaneous quality of his preparatory drawings. A ghost composition in this series would typically employ a restricted palette — pallid flesh tones, cold blues, inky blacks — with the figure isolated against an empty or atmospherically washed background, heightening the psychological impact. Kyosai approached such subjects with neither sentimentality nor sensationalism, treating them as legitimate pictorial problems requiring formal solutions.