Nizaemon Yamamura

Yamamura is remembered less for his own face than for the canvas he left behind, a work titled Under the Moon that depicts his bride Nanase. Its darkness is what sets it apart, a black drawn from an unknown pigment he found deep inside the trunk of an ancient tree. Legend holds it to be the most evil and blackest painting ever made.

The one trait that has outlasted the man is the fury he carried to his death. The hatred that filled him at the moment of his execution is said to have flowed into his artwork, lending it a life and a murderous will of its own. In that sense his defining quality is a resentment so intense it refused to die with his body.

Roughly three centuries before that story takes place, Yamamura took Nanase Kishibe as his wife. He had discovered a pigment of impossible blackness within the trunk of an old tree and drew it out to paint Under the Moon, but that tree was ancient and protected, its felling forbidden by decree, so he was put to death only just after his wedding. The cursed painting resurfaced in 1989 when the Louvre acquired it and stored it in a warehouse labeled Z-13, which was afterward left abandoned; for reasons never explained, it alone was never moved somewhere safer. When Rohan Kishibe ventures into Z-13 in the company of Gaucher, Noguchi, and a pair of firefighters, everyone but Rohan is slain by the creatures the artwork conjures, and he survives only by wiping his own memory clean. When he later tries to learn the painting's fate, he finds to his disbelief that scientists had it incinerated after study.