Genji Monogatari

The seventh plate in Saito Kaoru's ten-volume mezzotint series on The Tale of Genji, produced between 1982 and 1991. Listed here as etching, the work is in fact a mezzotint — an intaglio process in which the printmaker prepares a plate that prints solid black, then burnishes selected areas back toward white to compose the image. Saito turned to mezzotint in 1968 after working initially in abstract oil painting, and within roughly fifteen years he had brought the technique to the level of finish required for a sustained literary cycle of this scale. The Genji prints are typically modest in dimension and rely heavily on negative space within the plate; the figures, often female, materialize from a surrounding darkness rather than being set against a defined ground. This compositional habit reflects both the technical character of mezzotint and the interior, twilit atmosphere of Murasaki Shikibu's eleventh-century novel.