Genji Monogatari

The eighth plate in Saito Kaoru's ten-volume Genji Monogatari mezzotint cycle (1982–1991), here catalogued as etching but printed in the mezzotint manner that distinguishes Saito's mature work. By this point in the series — three-quarters of the way through a project that took nearly a decade to complete — Saito had refined a consistent visual approach: a single female figure or pair of figures emerging from a shadowed ground, their kimono and hair rendered through the gradual burnishing of a rocked plate rather than through line. The choice of medium aligns Saito with Hamaguchi Yozo as one of the two Japanese printmakers most identified with mezzotint in the second half of the twentieth century, but where Hamaguchi worked principally in still life, Saito tied his practice to the classical literary canon. Each plate in the series corresponds to a chapter or scene from Murasaki Shikibu's novel, treated as a quiet interior tableau rather than a narrative illustration.