Picture Book of Crawling Creatures (The Insect Book) (Ehon mushi erami) 画本虫撰
Kitagawa Utamaro 喜多川歌麿 Japanese
Not on view
Utamaro was a pupil of the Kanō school painter Toriyama Sekien (1712–1788). Each double-page illustration of insects and reptiles has a pair of kyōka—"comic poems on the feelings of love"—inspired by the images. Here, the kyōka involve an evening cicada and a spider:
Evening cicada, is it you who steals the right moment to fly into another's arms?
But you cry constantly like a poor soul living one day at a time.
A spider returning to his nest reminds me
Of a man furtively dragging his clothes and creeping up to a lady's boudoir.
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