Morning-Glories, Rabbits, and Moon

Morning-Glories, Rabbits, and Moon is a 1775 woodblock print by Isoda Koryusai that gathers some of the most lyrical motifs in Japanese seasonal iconography into a single composition. Morning glories, asagao, were summer flowers prized for their evanescence, blooming with the dawn and wilting by midday, and they became one of the central emblems of mono no aware, the bittersweet appreciation of passing things that pervades Japanese poetry and visual culture. Rabbits, especially when paired with the moon, evoked the legend of the moon rabbit pounding rice cakes on the lunar surface, a story that traveled from China and India into Japanese folklore. By combining the three motifs, Koryusai constructs a layered seasonal image that touches both midsummer asagao culture and the moon-viewing rituals of autumn. His draftsmanship gives the flowers a precise floral architecture, with trumpet blooms cradled by curling leaves and slender stems winding upward through the composition. The rabbits are observed with the same naturalist's attention he brought to his bird-and-flower prints, while the moon disc anchors the upper register with quiet authority. Although his fame ultimately rested on the Yoshiwara fashion series Hinagata Wakana no Hatsu Moyo, projects like this confirm Koryusai's command of kacho-e, the bird-and-flower tradition that paralleled his bijin-ga throughout his career. The Art Institute of Chicago houses this impression among its Koryusai holdings.