Kiyomori sees hundreds of skulls at Fukuhara

A frequently reproduced supernatural subject in Yoshitoshi's catalogue, drawn from the Heike monogatari: Taira no Kiyomori, the dying chancellor whose clan was being destroyed by the Minamoto, looks into the snowy garden of his Fukuhara villa and sees not snow but a mass of human skulls, which then resolve into a single enormous skull staring back at him. Yoshitoshi treated the episode in Shinkei sanjūrokkaisen (New Forms of Thirty-six Ghosts, 1889-1892), the supernatural series that occupied his final working years. The composition uses the diagonal of Kiyomori's gaze across the white ground to push the eye toward the accumulating skulls, with [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) blending the snow into the bone — a deliberate visual pun on karmic vision. The mokuhanga keyblock line is hard and incised in the skulls and soft in the snow, exploiting the tonal range that fine [baren](/glossary/baren)-rubbed printing on heavy [washi](/glossary/washi) could produce.