Poetry Of early autumn

The title invokes the Japanese poetic tradition of seasonal sensibility (kigo), where early autumn calls forth particular images: cooling winds, the first reddening leaves, lingering cicadas. Yamaguchi's treatment is unlikely to be descriptive in the manner of late shin-hanga; instead, the literary subject probably appears through reduced color and abstracted form --- warm ochres, rust, and muted greens against a paler ground, with carved marks suggesting falling leaves or branches rather than depicting them. Yamaguchi often worked at the edge between abstraction and reference, using titles drawn from poetry, music, or natural phenomena to frame compositions that read as autonomous fields of texture and color. The print would have been built up through multiple block impressions on washi, with bokashi gradations softening transitions between zones. Tagging the work to autumn foliage and literary themes places it within the long Japanese practice of pairing visual art with seasonal verse, which Yamaguchi reinterpreted in a modernist register.