Negourukatachi — Water in the Beginning and in the End

The title situates this print within Hayashi's Negourukatachi series — forms of wishing — while invoking water as a cosmological frame: both origin and conclusion. The pairing recalls long-standing East Asian and Buddhist motifs in which water serves as the elemental substrate of becoming and dissolution. Visually, prints from this group typically render their subjects through accumulated mark rather than figurative depiction; water here is likely suggested by linear current, aquatint wash, and the layered translucency of chine-collé in gampi paper. Hayashi's intaglio process — drypoint and etched line laid into and over tonal fields — lends itself to evoking liquid as both surface and depth, the bitten line carrying weight while the gampi inserts admit light. The print extends the meditative scale of his small-format work, in which a single plate can carry an unhurried elemental theme. Within his wider practice, water joins wind, breath, and dharma as one of several recurring elemental references that Hayashi treats not as discrete subjects but as ongoing conditions to which his marks return. The temporal framing — beginning and end — reflects the cyclical sensibility running through the Negourukatachi works.