A Fight Between Samurai Katō Toranosuke and Yamai Masatada

This 1883 [musha-e](/glossary/musha-e) [diptych](/glossary/diptych) by Utagawa Toyonobu depicts the duel between Katō Toranosuke (Kiyomasa, before his elevation to the surname Katō) and Yamai Masatada, with the antagonists falling down a steep mountain slope as they fight. The composition captures the precarious physicality of the duel through the diagonal placement of the figures, the cascading bodies, and the suggested motion of the fall, in a format that exemplifies the dynamic action-scene mode of Meiji warrior prints. The Katō-Yamai encounter belongs to the larger Hideyoshi-Toyotomi narrative cycle that Toyonobu treated comprehensively in his Shinsen Taikōki series, and this independent diptych may have functioned either as a related but unaffiliated work or as part of a broader publishing project on Sengoku duels. Toyonobu's drawing is in his mature Meiji style, with the bright aniline reds of the costume and the careful articulation of the falling figures testifying to his command of multi-sheet narrative composition. The print is preserved through the Japanese Art Open Database (JAODB), an aggregator of late-Edo and Meiji print images, and is recorded as one of the artist's rare surviving works.