Japanese Wren and Daffodil, from Pictorial Monograph of Birds (Shūchō gafu)

Japanese Wren and Daffodil pairs the misosazai (Japanese wren, the tiniest of the songbirds of the Japanese archipelago and one of the very smallest songbirds in the world) with the early-spring blossoms of suisen (Narcissus tazetta, the paperwhite daffodil, a flower naturalized in Japan and associated with the cold pre-spring weeks of January and February). The pairing trades on the relative scale of bird and plant: the wren and the daffodil are both modest in size, and Kashū's composition takes advantage of that fact to create one of the most compact and intimate images in the Shūchō gafu (1885). The Japanese wren is a brown, short-tailed bird of forest understory whose remarkably loud song is one of the audible signs of winter in the Japanese countryside; the suisen flowers in the cold months along the coast of central and western Honshū. The plate puts both species into a single small visual unit, in keeping with the album's habit of finding seasonal logic in the pairing of bird and plant even when neither is particularly spectacular in isolation.