Bijin Ghost and Skull

Bijin Ghost and Skull, recorded through the ukiyo-e.org archive, belongs to the darker tradition of ukiyo-e that intertwines beauty with mortality. The pairing of a beautiful woman with a ghost and a skull invokes the long line of Japanese supernatural prints, from Hokusai's ghost stories to the macabre subjects favored by Yoshitoshi in the late nineteenth century. For a Meiji audience, such images carried both folkloric and theatrical associations, evoking ghost stories, kabuki performances, and serialized supernatural fiction. Tomioka Eisen's handling of the subject demonstrates his fluency with the wider repertoire of late ukiyo-e narrative subjects, well beyond the conventional bijin-ga for which he was best known.