Let’s take a moment to appreciate this monstrous yōkai of Japanese imagination-Gashadokuro appear as gigantic skeletons, assembled from the combined bones of famine victims, or in this case, the bodies of the soldiers that followed Masakado to their deaths. She grips a magic scroll, reading the spell to summon a Gashadokuro. In this print we see the princess on the left, framed in the broken palace blinds. She meets with a mountain hermit and studies dark magic, plotting revenge on her uncle Sadamori, who cut off her father’s head and carried it to Tokyo.
The ghosts of soldiers fallen in the revolution haunt the moldering ruins, and Princess Takiyasha has turned to witchcraft. Masakado’s daughter, the Princess Takiyasha, lives in the the family’s shōen, the once great palace of Soma. This image tells the strange story of what came after the revolt. After fifty-nine days of victories against outposts Masakado’s cousin Taira no Sadamori, faced down his army and killed in the battle of Kojima. In 939CE in the Heian period in Japan, the samurai warlord Taira no Masakado marched west from his home in Kantō, leading a doomed army against Japan’s central government in Kyoto.
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