A lone pheasant endures a snowy winter’s night perched on a tall rock before two entwined pine trees. The majority of the composition is decorated with a blizzard of gold flakes individually set against the black lacquer ground. Early court poetry has often commented on how pheasants are found in pairs or groups during the day, but separate at night; this tendency prompting poets to associate the bird with loneliness.

The interior is contrastingly decorated with a village beside autumnal rice fields: a scarecrow overlooks the ripe, wind-tossed stalks, thatched farmer’s dwellings are tucked beside rocks and bamboo, and the slope of the mountainside where a stream flows into an irrigation channel for the crops present a scene of harvest time. Paired with a water dropper (suiteki) in the form of a zither (koto), it has been suggested that the rural landscape tousled by an autumn wind alludes to a poem composed by Ki no Tsurayuki (872-945) compiled in the Poetry Collection of Elegance (Fuga wakashu):

As the autumn wind
tunes the sound of the pine trees
to my koto’s notes
does it also gently pluck
the streams of the waterfall?

Matsu no oto o
koto ni shiraburu
akikaze wa
taki no ito
yasugete hiku

The name Chobei inscribed to the reverse of the inkstone was used by the Nakumura family of inkstone carvers, established as craftsmen for the shogunate throughout the Edo period.

When first published, this fine suzuribako was in the possession of the Washington real estate broker and auctioneer Thomas E. Waggaman, part of whose collection had earlier been catalogued by the celebrated British-American New York art dealer Edward Greey (1835-1888). Other works from Waggaman's collection are in the Denys Eyre Bower collection in Chiddingstone Castle, Kent.