Brown-eared Bulbul and Dioecious Holly, from Pictorial Monograph of Birds (Shūchō gafu)

Brown-eared Bulbul and Dioecious Holly pairs the hiyodori (brown-eared bulbul), one of the most familiar garden and woodland birds of the Japanese archipelago, with a sprig of dioecious holly, a winter-flowering and red-berried shrub long associated in Japanese folk practice with the warding off of evil at the seasonal turn from old year to new. Kashū's drawing of the bird in the Shūchō gafu (1885) shows the long body, sharp beak, and slightly disheveled crest that distinguish the species from related songbirds, and his composition uses the holly branch as both a perch and a decorative scaffold for the asymmetric vertical placement that the older kachō-e tradition had inherited from centuries of Edo-period printmaking. The hiyodori is a common bird in Japanese poetry — a noisy, aggressive feeder whose call is one of the audible signs of winter and early spring in the Japanese countryside — and Kashū's plate is one of several pages in the album in which a single closely observed species is paired with a seasonal plant of equally strong literary association, producing an image at once naturalist and lyric.