Japanese Jungle Nightjar, from Pictorial Monograph of Birds (Shūchō gafu)

Japanese Jungle Nightjar depicts the yotaka (Japanese jungle nightjar, Caprimulgus indicus), a nocturnal insect-eating bird of mountain forest and woodland edge whose strange cryptic plumage of grey, brown, and ochre mottling is a virtuoso challenge for any printmaker working in color woodblock. The nightjar is associated in Japanese folklore with summer twilight, dusk, and the kind of half-glimpsed natural presence that Edo-period writers liked to invoke as an emblem of the borderlands between waking and dream — Miyazawa Kenji's later twentieth-century story "Yodaka no hoshi" ("The Star of the Nightjar") draws on the same fund of associations. Kashū's plate in the Shūchō gafu (1885) handles the bird's flat-on-the-ground posture, oversized eye, and patterned wing surface with the kind of multi-block color carving that the Tokyo printers had to push to its technical limits, since nightjar plumage is essentially a continuous gradation of small variegated patches rather than a clean palette of distinct fields. The plate is one of the more technically ambitious in the album.