Lu Chin Shen smashing the guardian figure at the Temple on the five-crested mountain in a drunken rage

The print illustrates an episode from the Suikoden, the Japanese rendering of the Chinese vernacular novel Shuihu zhuan: the renegade monk Lu Zhishen (Lu Chin Shen in Yoshitoshi's romanisation), having broken his order's prohibition on drink, returns intoxicated to the temple on Wutai Shan — the five-crested mountain — and tears down the guardian figure at the gate. The subject had been popularised in Kuniyoshi's 1820s series Tsūzoku Suikoden gōketsu hyakuhachinin no hitori, and the comparison is informative: where Kuniyoshi filled the sheet with tattooed musculature and turbulent line, Yoshitoshi's later treatment narrows the field to a single explosive instant of violence directed at a sacred object. Suikoden remained a steady source of musha-e through the nineteenth century, supplying the Japanese print tradition with a vocabulary of outlaw heroism that Yoshitoshi extended in several of his warrior series of the 1860s and 1880s.