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 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-rubbed printing on heavy washi could produce.