Mount Yoshino midnight-moon

Yoshino-yama yowa no tsuki (Mount Yoshino midnight-moon) belongs to Yoshitoshi's One Hundred Aspects of the Moon (Tsuki hyakushi), the serial undertaking issued between 1885 and 1892. The print depicts Iga no Tsubone, lady-in-waiting to Emperor Go-Daigo, confronting the ghost of the courtier Sasaki no Kiyotaka beneath the moon at Mount Yoshino — the mountain refuge of the exiled Southern Court. The composition typically positions the resolute female figure against the spectral apparition, with the moon disc emerging through Yoshino's celebrated cherry trees or a screen of mist. Yoshitoshi modulates fine bokashi in the night sky and in the ghost's translucent form, using the multi-block nishiki-e process to register the pale opacity of the spirit against denser pigment in Iga's robes. The series was conceived as a literary-pictorial encyclopedia of moon-related episodes drawn from Japanese and Chinese history, theater, and legend, and constitutes Yoshitoshi's most sustained late-period engagement with the night sky as expressive ground.