#81 Maharoba

Maharoba (more commonly transliterated mahoroba) is an archaic Japanese term for an enclosed, ideal land — a place ringed by mountains and felt as homeland. The word appears in the Kojiki, where Yamato Takeru invokes Yamato as mahoroba, and has long carried a lyrical charge in classical Japanese poetry. As the title of a Hayashi etching, it imports this layered geographic-poetic referent into an abstract register; the print likely does not depict a literal landscape but registers the idea of bounded interior space through mark and tonal field. Technically, the plate would combine drypoint and etched line with aquatint passages, possibly with chine-collé, on gampi. Within Hayashi's 2003 group — alongside Lao-tse, Cocoon, and Spinning the Wind — Maharoba represents a turn toward textually anchored titles drawn from classical Japanese sources, complementing the Chinese philosophical reference of the Lao-tse plates. The work sits within a broader strand of his practice in which named place gives way to named idea, while the visual vocabulary remains continuous.