The last stand of Masatsura in the battle of Shijo-nawate

A musha-e (warrior print) depicting Kusunoki Masatsura (1326–1348) at the Battle of Shijōnawate, where the young general — son of the loyalist hero Kusunoki Masashige — was killed leading Southern Court forces against the Ashikaga army of Kō no Moronao. The print captures the climactic moment of the engagement, with Masatsura in full ō-yoroi armor amid a press of attackers; the subject was a fixture of Meiji-era nationalist iconography, the Kusunoki line being held up as the exemplar of self-sacrificial imperial loyalty after the Meiji Restoration. Gekko's warrior sheets typically organize battle scenes around a single identified protagonist whose features and armor are rendered with portrait-level care while surrounding combatants are massed with looser linework. The design sits within the body of historical and Sino-Japanese War prints that made Gekko commercially prominent in the 1890s, and reflects the same loyalist historical program that animates his Wake no Kiyomaro sheets in the Gekko zuihitsu albums.