Picture of the Fever of Taira no Kiyomori

"Picture of the Fever of Taira no Kiyomori" (August 1883) depicts the dying Taira clan chieftain consumed by the burning fever that accompanied his final illness in 1181—a supernatural heat that the Heike Monogatari describes as so intense that attendants could not approach him and water evaporated before it reached his skin. Yoshitoshi renders the scene of Kiyomori's tormented deathbed with hallucinatory intensity, the fevered visions of the tyrant's deranged mind threatening to overwhelm the boundary between the natural and the supernatural.