Grey Starling and Cercidiphyllum Japonicum (Katsura), from Pictorial Monograph of Birds (Shūchō gafu)

Grey Starling and Katsura pairs the mukudori (grey starling, a common gregarious bird of Japanese fields, parks, and urban edges) with the heart-shaped leaves of the katsura tree (Cercidiphyllum japonicum), a native deciduous tree noted in Japan for the sweet caramel-sugar fragrance of its yellowing autumn foliage. The pairing locates the plate firmly in autumn — both the bird's social flocking behavior and the katsura's seasonal yellow are autumn signatures — and gives Kashū the opportunity for a composition organized around the warm yellows and tans of the season rather than the brighter primary colors of the spring and summer plates. The grey starling is a relatively undecorated species: dark body, white facial patch, yellow legs and beak, the kind of bird that earlier conventional kachō-e tended to overlook in favor of more colorful subjects. Its inclusion in the Shūchō gafu reflects Kashū's commitment to the album's ornithological breadth, treating common species with the same observational care as the imperial pheasants and eagles, in the same way that the older Maruyama-Shijō painting school had insisted on the dignity of close natural observation regardless of conventional decorative appeal.