The Ascent of the Dragon's Gate

From the legend of the Dragon's Gate (登龍門, Tōryūmon), in which a carp that succeeds in climbing the cascade of the Yellow River is transformed into a dragon — a subject central both to Chinese mythological painting and to the Japanese boys'-day iconography of perseverance and ambition. Ozawa Nankoku composes the scene around the vertical rush of the waterfall at centre, with the carp arching upward through the spray and the cloud-and-mist forms of the upper register already beginning to dissolve into the suggestion of the dragon that the fish is about to become. Ozawa uses repeated long vertical strokes to describe the falling water, a device borrowed directly from late-Edo kachōga drawing manuals, and the carp's body twists across these vertical lines in a single sinuous curve. The plate is among the most technically demanding compositions Ozawa contributed to the book, and Henry W. Troy's New York cut preserves the energy of the original brush-line by reserving its tonal hatching for the cliff faces at left and right rather than the central waterfall.