Shima Sako Tomoyuki hit by a bullet during the battle at Sekigahara

A second sheet treating the same subject — Shima Sakon Tomoyuki's wounding by a musket ball at Sekigahara on the fifteenth day of the ninth month, 1600 — this print represents either a variant impression or a related design from Yoshitoshi's mid-1880s programme of warrior subjects. As with the companion sheet, the artist concentrates on the moment of impact rather than the surrounding pageant of the battle: a single figure, his weight shifting, set against the smoke and disorder of the Western army's collapse. Yoshitoshi's musha-e characteristically attend to bodies under physical and emotional pressure, and Sekigahara — the battle that closed the Sengoku and inaugurated more than two centuries of Tokugawa peace — supplied him with material in which the dignity of the defeated became the central pictorial fact. Bokashi gradation, tight cropping, and a restricted palette reinforce the focus on the wounded retainer.