A painter’s household in Tokyo
Museum records identify Nankoku as born in 1844. He was married to the painter Nampo, born Takei Tsuru, whose work also reached Western collections. Ayako Ono’s archival research places the couple in Nihonbashi, Tokyo’s commercial centre. It describes a household involved in exhibitions, civic affairs and educational and charitable activity, extending their working lives beyond individual commissions.
Nankoku’s surviving paintings include Crane Standing in a Field of Grain in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art. The scroll sets a carefully rendered bird against rice plants arranged in a repeating pattern. This work gives a broader view of his art than the book illustrations alone. His death date remains uncertain, and the surviving records do not support a continuous account of his later years.
Drawings for Griffis’s stories
In his 1880 preface to Japanese Fairy World, Griffis calls Nankoku his artist friend in Tokyo. He says the drawings were made specially for the volume and that Henry W. Troy engraved them in New York. He also specifies one exception: the picture of Yorimasa the Archer came from an unnamed student. The volume thus preserves a credit for both the principal artist and an additional contribution.
The collection’s thirty-four stories include animal transformations, heroic exploits and encounters with gods and spirits. Griffis explains that Japanese art had led him to seek the stories behind its figures. Nankoku’s drawings gave a visual form to the selected tales, while Griffis’s English retellings and Troy’s engravings completed other parts of the publication. The printed book brought their separate work together for a new audience.
