Winter Moon (Kangetsu), left screen

Winter Moon (寒月, Kangetsu), the left screen of a pair of six-panel folding screens dated 1922, is the painted return to a subject Konoshima Ōkoku had first developed in his celebrated 1912 Bunten composition of the same title. Painted in ink and color on silk and now held by the Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art, the screens depict a fox crossing a moonlit winter landscape of bamboo and bare ground. The left screen carries the bamboo grove side of the composition: vertical stalks rendered in pale ink wash against the cold ground, with the moon disk hanging high in the upper register and the still air of midwinter captured through near-monochrome tonalities. The work measures approximately 167 by 372 cm and follows the conventions of the formal folding-screen format in which Ōkoku worked throughout his career. The 1912 original version of Kangetsu had won the highest prize at the Bunten but had provoked the celebrated critical objection of the novelist Natsume Sōseki, who argued that the fox in moonlight failed to convey the silence the subject demanded; later critics largely vindicated Ōkoku's restrained handling, and the 1922 reprise extends the same compositional idea in a slightly more atmospheric key.