from the series One Hundred Pictures by Kyôsai (Kyôsai hyakuzu)

A sheet from Kyosai hyakuzu, this print belongs to a series that documents Kyosai's facility across an unusually wide range of pictorial genres. The subject here may be a kitsune, the fox spirit of Japanese tradition, shown in the act of transformation or engaged in one of the nocturnal rituals — fox fires, wedding processions — associated with these shape-shifting figures in Edo-period popular culture. Kyosai's handling of the kitsune combined folkloric familiarity with psychological ambiguity: his foxes are neither simply sinister nor straightforwardly comic, but poised between registers. The composition likely employs a nighttime setting, with [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) gradation conveying darkness and the foxes' phosphorescent fires rendered in pale yellow or blue-white pigment against a deep ground. The print exemplifies Kyosai's command of atmospheric color effects within the technical constraints of woodblock production.