The Star-Lovers Meeting on the Bridge of Birds

Date:: 1880 (page 6, Trübner edition 1887)
Medium:: Wood-engraved book illustration after an original brush-and-ink drawing by Ozawa Nankoku of Tokyo; engraving by Henry W. Troy, New York
Source:: Project Gutenberg (Trübner 1887 edition)

Description

Page six of Griffis's 'Japanese Fairy World' is given to the Tanabata legend of the weaver-princess Orihime and the herdsman Hikoboshi, separated annually across the Milky Way and reunited on the seventh night of the seventh month when a flock of magpies links their wings into a bridge across the celestial river. Ozawa Nankoku composes the scene as a pair of figures meeting near the centre of the sheet on a softly arcing band of birds, with the river of stars suggested as a wash of horizontal lines behind them. The lovers' robes fall in the long flowing diagonals familiar from late-Edo bijinga drawing, and the magpies are reduced almost to a pattern of overlapping shapes — a solution that survives the translation into wood-engraving better than a fully detailed Japanese keyblock would. Henry W. Troy's New York cut renders the figures with smooth white outlines against a dark sky, and the engraving's tight hatching has been used to define the river of stars rather than to model the bodies. The result is closer to a tonal print than a Japanese line print, but the underlying drawing — the elegant turn of the woman's head, the planted weight of the herdsman's foot on the central magpie — is recognisably the work of a Tokyo-trained brush draughtsman.

More Prints by Ozawa Nankoku

The Sorceress Melting the Bell

1880 (page 262, Trübner edition 1887)

Wood-engraved book illustration after an original brush-and-ink drawing by Ozawa Nankoku of Tokyo; engraving by Henry W. Troy, New York

The Monkeys in Grief

1880 (page 150, Trübner edition 1887)

Wood-engraved book illustration after an original brush-and-ink drawing by Ozawa Nankoku of Tokyo; engraving by Henry W. Troy, New York

How the Sun-Goddess Was Enticed Out of Her Cave

1880 (frontispiece, Trübner edition 1887)

Wood-engraved book illustration after an original brush-and-ink drawing by Ozawa Nankoku of Tokyo; engraving by Henry W. Troy, New York

A Jingle for a Sniff

1880 (page 206, Trübner edition 1887)

Wood-engraved book illustration after an original brush-and-ink drawing by Ozawa Nankoku of Tokyo; engraving by Henry W. Troy, New York

More Bridges Prints

Fair Weather After Snow at Yamato Bridge, Kyoto (Yamato bashi no yukibare), Taishô period, dated 1924

Woodblock print

Mount Fuji on a Moonlit Night, Kawai Bridge (Tsukiyo no Fuji [Kawaibashi]), from the series "Selection of Views of the Tokaido (Tokaido fukei senshu)"

1947

Color woodblock print; oban

Shin Ohashi Bridge (Shin Ohashi), from the series "Twenty View of Tokyo (Tokyu nijukkei)"

1926

Color woodblock print; oban

Sacred Bridge in Nikko (Nikko Shinkyo)

1930

Color woodblock print; oban

Frequently Asked Questions

The Star-Lovers Meeting on the Bridge of Birds was created by Ozawa Nankoku (小沢南谷) in 1880 (page 6, Trübner edition 1887).

The Star-Lovers Meeting on the Bridge of Birds depicts bridges.