Die Grille und der Tau
A Katydid on Iron
A kirigirisu kozuka of iron, almost empty. Near one end stands a single insect, a kirigirisu, its body inlaid in pale metal, its legs angled out. From its head two antennae sweep back across the field in gold, longer than the body by far. Around it lie a few small dots of silver and gold and some shallow hollows in the iron, like drops of dew.
Everything else is iron. The two gold lines carry the composition, and the empty field around them is the autumn night. The collection holds another autumn insect on a kozuka, a cricket in grass by Hamano Noriyuki, worked in warm sentoku and crowded with plants. Set beside it, this iron kozuka shows how little the same season needs. Two other iron kozuka in the collection keep the same restraint, one with a spider and one with a bird by the water.
The kirigirisu was a familiar figure in Edo art. Kitagawa Utamaro gave it a page of its own in his Picture Book of Crawling Creatures of 1788, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. There the garden insects are drawn one by one. The kozuka is unsigned and has no paper.
Kozuka. Mumei. Tetsu, iroe-zogan in kin und gin. Kirigirisu ni tsuyu-zu. Edo-Zeit. Privatsammlung, erworben in Europa.
In the collection
- Type
- Tosogu › Kozuka
- Period
- Edo-Zeit
- Material
- Tetsu
- Motif
- Insekten
