Hakuzosu the Fox-Spirit
Ōtagaki Rengetsu Japanese
Not on view
This lightly brushed image of a fox garbed as a Buddhist nun acquires a clever, perhaps personal dimension in the poem that the nun Rengetsu inscribed in her much-admired script. The delicate vivacity of its classic style well suits her vision of a long-standing superstition holding that foxes transform themselves into human form to bewitch the unwary, particularly at twilight.
A trickster
in Sagano fields
at twilight
my tail in plumes of grass—
Will it look like a sleeve?
signed Rengetsu
There is a play of word and image elucidated by the donor of this scroll. The word obana, written with characters meaning "tail-flower," is classic poetic diction for autumn plumes of susuki, the tall grasses painted here to signify Sagano, a place name often used in poetry as a pun on saga, "one's nature."
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