The Monkeys in Grief

An interior scene from a folktale of bereavement in which a community of monkeys gathers to mourn the death of one of their number. Ozawa Nankoku places the seated mourners around the small body in a shallow ring on the floor of a simple Japanese room, with the screens behind them partly open onto a suggestion of forest. The drawing relies on posture rather than facial expression to communicate the subject: the heads are lowered, the shoulders rolled forward, the hands tucked into folded arms. The composition is unusually quiet for an illustration in this book, more closely related to the late-Edo tradition of giga (humorous and anthropomorphic animal painting) than to the more theatrical mythological plates earlier in the volume. Henry W. Troy's New York engraving cuts the figures with a calmer line than the action scenes elsewhere in the book, an editorial decision that preserves the contemplative pace of Ozawa's underlying brush drawing.