Tanuki with Autumn Moon

Tanuki with Autumn Moon is one leaf from the 1873 Mori Kansai album in the Rhode Island School of Design Museum (accession 2001.16F). The tanuki — the Japanese raccoon dog, a small omnivorous forest mammal celebrated in folklore for its trickster qualities and its association with sake-drinking, hospitality, and seasonal abundance — is paired here with an autumn moon, the most poetically loaded of the year's celestial events. The combination plays on a long folkloric tradition (the tanuki's belly-drumming bara-tonton on autumn nights, his transformation skills, his role in the tales of Kachi-Kachi Yama and elsewhere) and on the formal demands of an autumn kachō-e subject. Kansai's drawing of the tanuki's fur, eye markings, and characteristic stocky posture reflects the Mori-Kishi school's discipline of close mammalian observation, while the spare moonlit setting against the album silk gives the leaf a haikai-style economy of means.