Soga Gorô gallops bareback to ôiso

Another scene from the Soga cycle, this design shows Soga no Gorō Tokimune riding bareback toward the post-station of Ōiso, where his lover, the courtesan Tora Gozen, awaited him at the Yawata-ya. The bareback gallop — kura nashi de hashiru — is one of the recurring episodes of the legend, traditionally read as an emblem of the warrior's headlong impetuosity and the thinness of the line he walks between vendetta and love. Yoshitoshi's [musha-e](/glossary/musha-e) treatment characteristically isolates horse and rider against a sparingly inked ground, using the diagonal thrust of the animal's body to convey velocity, while [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) shading along the horse's flanks and the rider's robes registers movement and breath. The print belongs to the artist's long engagement with Heian- and Kamakura-period heroes, a body of work that runs in parallel to his ghost prints and [bijin-ga](/glossary/bijin-ga) and that gave Meiji audiences a renewed visual vocabulary for the medieval past.