Coincidentally, something of the Baroque spirit is evident in the work of Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1797-1861) at the Royal Academy. Alongside his better-known contemporaries Hokusai and Hiroshige, Kuniyoshi was one of the great Japanese printmakers-the "artists of the floating world" - who not only took their own art form to new technical and imaginative levels but who inspired the taste for Japonisme in the West and influenced a generation of artists, including Monet, Whistler and Van Gogh.

Kuniyoshi was the son of a silk dyer and this heritage is discernible in the rich, throbbing colours and complicated designs of his prints. His favoured subjects were characters from legend, warrior heroes, actors and cats. When taking his motifs from fables he made them all the more fantastical - and sometimes terrifying (see his celebrated image of Mitsukuni Defying the Skeleton) with eye-skewing distortions of scale and a liberal smattering of ghosts and demons. Even his less supernatural subjects reek of otherworldliness: his cats, for example, positively smirk and look as if they are on the verge of talking.

The images brought forth by Kuniyoshi's extraordinarily fecund imagination - part William Blake, part Richard Strauss - also help to explain a cultural oddity: where the current Japanese mania for manga comics comes from.