Genji Monogatari

The final plate in Saito Kaoru's ten-volume mezzotint cycle on The Tale of Genji, completing a project that occupied him from 1982 to 1991. Listed here as etching, the work belongs more precisely to the mezzotint technique that Saito had practiced since 1968, when he turned from abstract oil painting to intaglio. By the cycle's tenth plate, Saito had pursued the synthesis of European mezzotint and Japanese literary subject matter across nearly a decade of sustained work — a parallel to Hamaguchi Yozo's mezzotint still lifes, but rooted in the classical canon rather than the everyday object. The image, like its predecessors in the series, is built up by burnishing a uniformly rocked copper plate rather than by drawing line: female figures and the spaces around them emerge as gradations of tone from a base of velvet black. The completion of the cycle in his sixtieth year is the achievement most often associated with Saito's name.