Picture of Mongaku’s Penitence

"Picture of Mongaku's Penitence" (April 1885) depicts the legendary monk Mongaku undergoing ascetic purification beneath the freezing waterfall of Nachi in Kumano. Mongaku (Endō Morito) had accidentally killed the woman he loved while attempting to murder her husband, and in remorse he undertook years of brutal penance before becoming a powerful Buddhist priest. Yoshitoshi renders the figure of the half-mad penitent beneath the cascading water with the kind of extreme physical drama that distinguished his treatment of religious subjects from conventional devotional imagery.