Hares Playing in Surf on a Moonlit Night

"Hares Playing in Surf on a Moonlit Night" is a chuban-format kacho-ga by Isoda Koryusai of about 1766. Hares in surf, often glossed in Japanese as "nami usagi," is a classical motif that links the white hare to the white foam of breaking waves and to the moon, a chain of associations that runs through East Asian poetry and decorative art and that resurfaces repeatedly in Edo ukiyo-e. Koryusai treats the subject as a tightly framed nocturne, with two or more hares arranged along a curve of wave that crosses the sheet from one corner to the other, the moon implied by a flat patch of unprinted paper rather than emphatically inscribed. As the principal Harunobu successor in the very first years of nishiki-e printing, Koryusai is working in an idiom in which kacho-ga, bijin-ga and mitate-e were all being adapted to the new multi-block color technique. The Art Institute of Chicago impression preserves the careful registration and soft palette of blue, white and grey-brown that the print's design demands. Within Koryusai's career the print is a small but characteristic example of the natural-history strand that runs alongside his bijin-ga and hashira-e (pillar prints), and which culminated, in the 1770s, in the long sequence of pillar-format bird-and-flower prints that historians now regard as among his most accomplished work.