An ink-black wolf-like yōkai beast rears in a bare white void, its shaggy coat rendered in expressive dry-brush sumi strokes, one piercing blue eye alight as its head throws back and its jaws open wide to swallow a ribbon of living starlight. That ribbon is an iridescent serpent-eel, pale silver-blue with fin-fringed edges like an oarfish, coiling through the beast's mouth, around its chest and leaping limbs, its own jaws open in answer at the lower right in a dance of devouring and embrace. Scattered four-pointed cobalt stars float like celestial crests across the unpainted silk-white space, with no ground and no horizon, negative space serving as sky. The serpent's body glows from within with azurite and silver-leaf sheen while the beast absorbs all light, its contours picked out in faint silver. The composition is a full-body vertical scroll format, the entwined pair forming a dynamic S-curve diagonal in flat pictorial space without perspective. Rendered in the aesthetic of an Edo-period yōkai emaki: sumi ink washes, mineral-pigment accents of azurite blue, silver-leaf highlights, crisp contour lines, decorative sparkle motifs, feral tension and celestial play held in one luminous struggle.
