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.
朝妻舟図摺物
mid-19th century
Woodblock print diptych (surimono); ink and color on paper with metallic pigments
梅花小禽図
1873
Album leaf; ink and color on silk
能効藥種
circa 1847–1852
Woodblock-printed book illustration; ink and color on paper
波貝図
1873
Album leaf; ink and color on silk
![Mount Fuji on a Moonlit Night, Kawai Bridge (Tsukiyo no Fuji [Kawaibashi]), from the series "Selection of Views of the Tokaido (Tokaido fukei senshu)" by Kawase Hasui](https://www.artic.edu/iiif/2/d0960668-1e73-339a-b182-fb995a54bff0/full/843,/0/default.jpg)
1947
Color woodblock print; oban
March 1933
Color woodblock print; oban
1919
Color woodblock print
January 1938
Woodblock print, ink and color on paper
Tanuki with Autumn Moon (秋月狸図) was created by Mori Kansai (森寛斎) in 1873.
Tanuki with Autumn Moon depicts moonlight and autumn foliage.