2-716-820 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

'His beautiful hostess, seating herself beside the koto, began to sing a wild and beautiful air', 1919. 'Strange and wonderful to relate, the song was none other than the self-same poem which Shunko had composed that very evening, and had left fluttering from the branch of the cherry-tree beneath whose canopy of bloom he had rested. Falling completely under the bewitchment of his surroundings, Shunko felt that he wished to stay there for evermore, and a pang smote his breast at the thought that he soon must separate, if only for a few hours, from his mystic lady of the vale of cherry-blossoms...Could it be that the spirit of the cherry-tree, to whose beauty he had dedicated his poem, had appeared to him in human form to reward him for his life-long fidelity?' Illustration to "A Cherry-Flower Idyll", a story in "Romances of Old Japan", by Madame Yukio Ozaki. [Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co. Ltd, London, 1919]