Chapter 37- The Flute - 横笛

"The Flute" (Yokobue) is Chapter 37 of The Tale of Genji, in which Kashiwagi's memory persists through a flute he left behind — a flute that seems to carry his spirit and becomes a source of grief and guilty remembrance for those who knew him. The flute passes between characters as a vessel of emotion: heard at night, played by the child Kaoru (who may actually be Kashiwagi's son, not Genji's), it connects the living to the dead across the silence that death creates. Ebina's print captures the haunted atmosphere of this elegiac chapter.