#29 Considering Tokuyama Village — The Wind Filled with Roots

Tokuyama Village in Hayashi's native Gifu Prefecture was a mountain hamlet eventually submerged by the Tokuyama Dam reservoir in the 2000s; this etching, made while displacement was already underway, reads as elegy rather than topography. The "Considering" series functions as Hayashi's recurring meditative format, in which a place, text, or motif is revisited across successive plates. The phrase "wind filled with roots" suggests an inversion of the visible and the buried — air carrying what should anchor the ground. Compositionally, prints from this group typically combine fine drypoint linework with aquatint passages and chine-collé to introduce a second tonal register. Printed on gampi, the sheet reads as translucent, with the inked image hovering against the warm tone of the underlying washi. Within Hayashi's wider body of work, this etching belongs to a group of landscape-derived prints from the mid-1990s that resist topographical legibility in favor of mark and atmosphere — a vocabulary closer to calligraphic gesture than to the meisho-e tradition of place-prints.