In 1185, in the narrow strait of Dan-no-ura, the Taira clan lost the last great naval battle of Japan's civil war to the Minamoto. The Taira's child emperor, Antoku, drowned in the sea, along with his grandmother and many warriors. The defeat became legend, and so did what came next.
The tale, told in the Tale of the Heike and later in Noh and kabuki theater, says that the Taira dead did not rest. Years later, when the Minamoto general Yoshitsune sailed from Daimotsu Bay, a storm blew up, and the ghosts of the drowned Taira rose from the waves to attack his ship. Only the prayers of his companion, the warrior-monk Benkei, drove them back into the sea.
Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1797 to 1861) painted the scene as a triptych in the mid-nineteenth century, three sheets that join into a single dramatic panorama. A tall ship plunges through a sea of curling blue waves, and above the water the spectral army surges in a ghostly swirl. Kuniyoshi was famous for his warrior prints and his taste for the supernatural, and this one is among his most imaginative.
The legend also explains something else. Fishermen once believed that the Taira spirits lived on as crabs. Certain crabs of the Inland Sea have shell patterns that resemble a grimacing human face, called Heike crabs, and for years local fishermen threw them back into the water out of respect.
It is a ghost story, a war story, and a picture of how a nation's defeats can linger in the imagination.
Kuniyoshi's Ghosts of the Taira appears on our: