An Illustrated Mirror of Hawking | Kawanabe Kyōsai’s Falconry Art Book

For artists, collectors, and students of Japanese print culture, An Illustrated Mirror of Hawking is more than a beautifully made book. It’s a serious reference for studying Kawanabe Kyōsai’s observational drawing—how nature, movement, and ritual are translated into woodcut imagery with clarity and respect.

Kawanabe Kyōsai (also known as Kawanabe Tōiku) is celebrated for his range and invention, but one of his lesser-known masterpieces is Ehon Taka Kagami (The Mirror of Hawking), a woodcut picture book on Japanese falconry originally published in 1863.

Commissioned by a retired daimyo, Kyōsai created a sequence of detailed illustrations depicting traditional hawking practices. Alongside the plates are explanatory scripts, stories, poems, and songs—building a richer picture of falconry as both skill and cultural tradition, and of the relationship between humans and nature.

This new edition offers the first complete English translation of Kyōsai’s original text. It pairs faithful reproductions of the original images and captions with essays and reference images that contextualize Kyōsai’s work, Japanese falconry, and the origins of this rare publication.

• Use it to study: nature observation, movement, and compositional clarity
• Built for: Japanese art collectors, illustrators, designers, and reference-driven artists
• Why it matters: a focused window into craft, tradition, and image-making in woodcut form

Book details

• Title: An Illustrated Mirror of Hawking
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Pages: 164
• Size: 229 × 229 × 20 mm (9.02 × 9.02 × 0.79 in)