Le Lièvre et les Grenouilles (The Hare and the Frogs), from Choix de fables de La Fontaine illustrées par un groupe des meilleurs artistes de Tokio

Le Lièvre et les Grenouilles (The Hare and the Frogs) 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. La Fontaine's fable describes a timid hare who, considering himself the most fearful of animals, takes comfort in seeing that frogs are even more easily frightened than he is. Shūsui's composition shows a Japanese hare crouched in a marshy reed bed with a cluster of frogs leaping into the water at its approach — a scene transposed entirely into the visual idiom of late-Meiji Tokyo nihonga, with the linework and color drawn from the Kanō-school natural-history painting Shūsui had learned under Kanō Hōgai. The plate is signed in the bottom margin in Roman-letter transcription as "Oka-Koura-Shiou-Soui" and was printed in color woodblock at the Tsukiji-Tokyo workshop. The image is reproduced from the BNF-Gallica scan of the 1894 first edition, in the public domain.