This playful seasonal painting would have been intended for display during the eighth lunar month or September in today’s global calendar. The idea that the surface of the moon, as...
This playful seasonal painting would have been intended for display during the eighth lunar month or September in today’s global calendar. The idea that the surface of the moon, as seen from our earth, looks like a hare standing on its hind legs can be traced back to the art and literature of China’s Han dynasty and quickly made its way to Japan, where the animal was imagined pounding rice in a mortar to make the round rice dumplings, resembling the shape of the full moon, that are among the delicacies enjoyed at the Tsukimi ceremony, celebrated on the fifteenth day of the eighth month.
The further association of hares with waves derives from the early Japanese historical text Kojiki (Record of Ancient Matters), where a white hare or rabbit tricks sea monsters into letting him hop across their backs to the mainland. The story is referred to again in the medieval Noh play Chikubushima, set on an island in Lake Biwa northeast of Kyoto, where one of the chants paints a picture of the moon floating high in the sky above the lake, and the rabbit on the moon jumping across the waves.
Although Kawabe Kain’s precise life dates appear to be undocumented, the recorded dates of his teacher Yokoyama Kazan (1781–1837) and his son Kawabe Kakyo (1844–1928) suggest that he was active in the mid to late nineteenth century. He was an official painter at the Chūgūji, a Buddhist nunnery and temple in Nara with strong links to Japan’s imperial family.