Moon over Musashino, from the series Worlds of Things (Momoyogusa)

Moon over Musashino (Musashino no tsuki) is a colour woodblock print from Momoyogusa (Flowers of a Hundred Worlds), the three-volume orihon design album issued in Kyoto in 1909-10 by Yamada Unsōdō and designed by Kamisaka Sekka (1866-1942). The Art Institute of Chicago's impression (127736) was acquired through the Mr. and Mrs. Hubert Fischer Fund. The plate is one of the most reproduced images in Sekka's oeuvre: a single full white moon rising over the silvery autumn grasses (susuki) of the Musashino plain, the entire composition reduced to a few flat planes of silver, white, and pale ink against a quiet ground. The reference to Musashino — the great grass plain extending east of Edo, a classical site in Heian poetry routinely paired with the autumn moon — situates the image in the deepest waka tradition while restating the motif in the spare graphic language of Sekka's neo-Rimpa modernism. The plate exemplifies the printing technology of late-Meiji Kyoto: silver pigment laid over many-block colour impressions, the grasses defined as much by the embossed (karazuri) ground as by their printed line. Together with Plovers Flying Across a River, Silvered Waves Against a Beach, and Hydrangeas, it is among the Momoyogusa plates most often cited in any survey of modern Japanese design.