Hakuzosu the Fox-Spirit

Ōtagaki Rengetsu

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

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."

Asian Art

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Met's collection of Asian art—more than 35,000 objects, ranging in date from the third millennium B.C. to the twenty-first century—is one of the largest and most comprehensive in the world. Each of the many civilizations of Asia is represented by outstanding works, providing an unrivaled experience of the artistic traditions of nearly half the world.

Metropolitan Museum of Art