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This untitled woodblock print by Kawanabe Kyosai likely belongs to the range of playful, freely imagined compositions for which the artist became celebrated in the later Meiji period. Contemporary Western observers, including the architect Josiah Conder who studied under Kyosai in the 1880s, remarked on the artist's ability to improvise complex scenes — processions of demons, assemblies of frogs, battles of fantastic creatures — with no preparatory sketch, executing the full design in a single brushing session. The woodblock translation of such spontaneous imagery required block-cutters of exceptional sensitivity to preserve the calligraphic energy of the original lines in the carved wood grain.