Of all the artists within the sosaku hanga movement, Taninaka Yasunori was perhaps the most eccentric and otherworldly. Born in Nara Prefecture in 1897, Taninaka lost his mother at the age of six. A year later, his father, bankrupt and penniless, uprooted the family to the capital of Seoul. From 1915 to 1922, Taninaka bounced back and forth between Japan and Korea in order to attend middle school. At the age of eighteen, he was shipped off to a boarding school in Tokyo, where he remained for three years before dropping out due to financial hardship. 

He remained in Tokyo, dabbling in sketches and poetry while working at a local bookstore. After discovering Nagase Yoshio's book, To People Who Want to Make Prints in 1922, Taninaka decided to become a hanga artist. After a brief stint working on a dojin titled Moro Monyo, Taninaka sought out the tutelage of his idol in 1927. Nagase took a shine to the young man's bizarre nature and taught him the basics of mokuhanga techniques. The two lived together in a small studio one floor above a kindergarten. 

Throughout the 1930s he provided illustrations for several books but had no regular employment or income, and throughout his life lived in poverty. In 1945, after a firebomb destroyed his home, Taninaka escaped to a bomb shelter where he resided in a damp, flooded basement. Becoming increasingly ill, he built a small hovel above ground and planted a pumpkin patch for food. 

In September of 1946, Taninaka died of malnutrition and starvation. It would not be until twenty years later in 1966 that columnists and critics would discover the artist's work at the Nantenshi Gallery in Tokyo. The art Taninaka Yasunori produced had no discernable style or influence but was rather dictated by his fanciful personality and fantastical imagination. A set of prints titled Kage-e Shibai (Shadow Play) featured in the magazine Han Geijutsu, is perhaps the best example. Taninaka plays with Oriental and Western pictorial devices, monochromatic patterns, and a sense of pattern that was later replicated in Okawabata, 1940.