Born as Yuzo Tsutsui in Hyogo prefecture, Toshimine worked as a kuchi-e artist during the Meiji period. Kuchi-e, were designed as frontispieces for books or as illustrations for literary magazines. These works often portrayed delicate and romantic beauties executed with meticulous printing technique. A student of the famous Yoshitoshi, Toshimine produced woodblock prints for novels such as Ochi Fukuchi’s Toshima Storm (1895) and Kyoka Izumi ’s Kanmuri Yazaemon (1896). He also contributed twelve prints to the literary magazine Bungei Kurabu and regularly designed prints for a second magazine, Jiji Shinpo, from 1894 until the close of the Meiji period. Though his exact year of death is unknown, he died after 1934. Toshimine signed his works in a variety of ways, at times writing "tsutsui" in hiragana, at others using a variant form of the second character in "Toshimine."