Tachibana Gadō
Artwork: The Night Parade of One Hundred Demons, 1892
Tachibana Gadō is the least documented artist in this collection: a painter of Japan's Meiji period whose name survives largely through the work below, a handscroll of 1892 held today by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Little is reliably recorded of his life, and the scroll has to speak for him.
What it says is considerable. The scroll paints the hyakki yagyō, the night parade of one hundred demons that was said to pour through dark streets, spiriting away anyone who witnessed it. One full section of the parade is reproduced here: a green demon strides at the head with a spear, a frog spirit rides a long-tailed turtle beast through the middle, and a great winged creature carrying fire brings up the rear. A scroll is read by unrolling it an arm's length at a time, so the parade never appears all at once. The print lets it.