Banshu

Banshu (晩秋) means 'late autumn,' the closing weeks of November when the Kitayama hills above Kyoto turn through ochre, rust, and brown before the first snow. The title places this print in Williams's seasonal cycle of mokuhanga documenting the agricultural year around Hanase and the surrounding villages. Late-autumn compositions in his work typically feature stripped rice paddies after the harvest, persimmon trees still bearing fruit on bare branches, smoke from burning rice straw, or the russet of beech and oak against cedar-green hillsides. The palette is warmer than his winter prints—earth reds, mustard yellows, the muted greens of evergreen conifers—achieved through multiple block impressions on [washi](/glossary/washi). Williams's commitment to documenting a specific landscape across five decades gives these seasonal markers a cumulative weight: each Banshu, each Solstice, each Hanase Winter is one frame in a long observational record of a countryside that has been progressively depopulating since he arrived in 1972.