Kyosai

After completing his apprenticeship under artists such as Utagawa Kuniyoshi and the Kano family of Surugadai, Kai Tōiku found himself living in poverty, with no work and no money. Day after day, he painted pictures that no one would buy, repeating a cycle of drinking himself into a stupor, until a strange frog began to take up residence with him. Deep down, his complex jealousy toward the late Katsushika Hokusai, who had shown him the basics of painting in his childhood and his pent-up frustration at not being recognized by the world only grew stronger... A pictorial chronicle of the “Painting Demon,” depicting the unrecognized, struggling years of Kawanabe Kyōsai, the peerless genius painter active from the late Edo period through the Meiji era.