Ekingura

Ekingura is part of why Kochi rewards travelers who read a little before they show up.

Hirose Kinzo, known as Ekin, was a Tosa painter of the late Edo period who lost his position after an accusation of forgery and spent the rest of his life painting folding screens for village festivals. His subject was kabuki, and specifically its most violent moments — decapitations, suicides, murders — rendered in a hard red that has been called blood red since. Twenty-three of these screens survive in the small town of Akaoka.

The museum built to hold them is deliberately dark. It reproduces the conditions of the summer festival at which the screens are traditionally shown outdoors after nightfall by candlelight, when the red flares and the figures move as the flame does. You can hear the sea from inside. It is an unusually well-made small museum about a genuinely strange body of work, and it costs ¥550.