The Sorceress Melting the Bell

An illustration to the legend of Kiyohime and the bell of Dōjō-ji, in which the rejected lover, transformed by jealousy into a serpent-demon, wraps her coils around the great bronze bell beneath which the monk Anchin has taken refuge and melts it with her fiery breath. Ozawa Nankoku stages the moment at the height of the conflagration: the bell is half-engulfed in flame at the centre of the composition, the serpent-woman's tail wraps around the rim, and a few small figures of attending priests flee at the edges of the scene. The drawing keeps the demonic form recognisable as a transformed Kiyohime — her face still partly human at the top of the snake's body — rather than dissolving entirely into bestial reptile, a choice that aligns the image with the Noh- and bunraku-stage tradition of the subject. Henry W. Troy's New York wood-engraving renders the fire with dense diagonal hatching and reserves cleaner outlines for the bell and the demon's head, giving the composition the strong central focus that the Griffis text required.