Mistflowers

A standalone print outside Saito Kaoru's principal Tale of Genji cycle, Mistflowers shifts attention from the figural subject of his literary series to the botanical world. The mistflower — fujibakama (Eupatorium fortunei) in Japanese — is one of the seven flowers of autumn celebrated in classical waka and prose, and appears in The Tale of Genji as the title and central image of one of its chapters. The subject therefore retains a tether to Saito's wider literary preoccupation even when the figure is absent. Catalogued here as etching, the print is executed in the mezzotint technique that defined Saito's practice: the plate roughened with a rocker and burnished selectively to produce a continuous tonal field rather than a linear drawing. The medium is well suited to the soft, clustered structure of fujibakama blossoms and the diffuse light in which they are typically depicted. As a kacho-e — bird-and-flower — subject, the work places Saito briefly within a tradition more often associated with the woodblock printers of earlier centuries.