Le Dragon à plusieurs têtes et le Dragon à plusieurs queues (The Many-Headed Dragon and the Many-Tailed Dragon), from Choix de fables de La Fontaine illustrées par un groupe des meilleurs artistes de Tokio

Le Dragon à plusieurs têtes et le Dragon à plusieurs queues (The Many-Headed Dragon and the Many-Tailed Dragon) is a color woodblock print designed by Okakura Shūsui for the 1894 Choix de fables de La Fontaine, the Tokyo-Paris illustrated book directed by Pierre Barboutau. The plate illustrates La Fontaine's brief political fable in which an emperor's ambassador describes two opposing armies as a many-headed dragon and a many-tailed dragon, the former divided in counsel and the latter united. Shūsui's composition draws directly on the Kanō-school dragon vocabulary that he had absorbed from Kanō Hōgai, and the brilliant color block printing at the Tsukiji-Tokyo workshop allowed him to render the metallic scales and cloud-streaked sky in a saturated palette that no European reproductive medium of the period could match. The signature in the plate, transcribed in the BNF cataloging as "Oka-Koura-Shiou-Soui," identifies the work as Shūsui's. The image is reproduced from the BNF-Gallica scan of the 1894 first edition, in the public domain; the print is one of six in the two-volume set designed by Shūsui, the largest contribution by any of the five Tokyo nihonga painters Barboutau commissioned.