Winter Moon (Kangetsu), right screen

Winter Moon (寒月, Kangetsu), the right screen of the pair of six-panel folding screens dated 1922, carries the fox subject that gives the composition its narrative center: a single fox padding across the moonlit ground at the foot of the bamboo grove, its tracks marked behind in the snow and its head turned slightly toward the viewer. Konoshima Ōkoku renders the fox with the close zoological observation he had cultivated through his years of sketching the foxes of the hills around Kyoto, giving the animal a specific anatomy and posture rather than a generic decorative outline. The composition is one of the most atmospheric in his oeuvre: the moonlight is suggested almost entirely through the modulation of ink wash, with the bamboo of the left screen carrying the vertical pictorial structure and the right screen providing the horizontal sweep of ground. Now held by the Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art, the screens connect to his 1912 Bunten composition of the same title — the subject that had drawn the famous critical objection of the novelist Natsume Sōseki — and stand as one of the central works of his mature career.