Tairao Kiyomori sees skulls in his snow-covered garden in Fukuhara

The print depicts the episode from the "Heike Monogatari" in which Taira no Kiyomori, the dying patriarch of the Taira clan, sees in his snow-covered garden at Fukuhara a vision of countless skulls — a ghostly portent of his clan's coming destruction and karmic recompense for his seizure of power. Yoshitoshi was drawn throughout his career to scenes of supernatural apparition, and this winter subject combines two strands he treated frequently: ghost imagery (yūrei-ga) and historical-warrior narrative. Compositionally, snow scenes in [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e) reserve broad areas of unprinted [washi](/glossary/washi) to read as accumulated snow, with sparing use of black [sumi](/glossary/sumi) line and faint [gomazuri](/glossary/gomazuri) (sesame-seed printing) for falling flakes; against this restrained ground, the swarming skulls appear as a dense, unsettling pattern half-merged with stones and shrubs. The Fukuhara garden — Kiyomori's short-lived alternate capital — reinforces the moral arc: the warlord confronting the consequences of his hubris. Among Yoshitoshi's many treatments of Taira-Minamoto conflict this print exemplifies his late-career preference for psychological-supernatural staging over open battle, an approach that helped reshape [musha-e](/glossary/musha-e) for a Meiji audience.