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Kawanable Kyōsai’s Night Parade of One Hundred Demons (1890) Kawanabe Kyōsai (1831–1889), aka “The Demon of Painting”, composed this book of woodblock illustrations toward the end of a life that had begun during the Edo period, when Japan was still a feudal country, and ended in the midst of the Meiji period, when the country was transforming into a modern state. Kyōsai was by all accounts the bad boy artist of his era. Considered both Japan’s first political caricaturist and one of the first authors of a manga magazine (Eshunbun Nipponchi), Kyōsai was arrested by the shogunate three times for his commitment to free expression. Also, he made no secret of his love for sake. The Night Parade of One Hundred Demons (Hyakki Yagyō) is a thousand-plus-year-old Japanese folkloric tradition, in which a series of demons parades — or explodes — into the ordinary human world. Kyōsai’s version was, according to the Metropolitan Museum of Art which houses the book, one of the artist’…