The Tale of Genji - Vol.4

Part of Saito Kaoru's ten-volume mezzotint series on The Tale of Genji, produced between 1982 and 1991. The fourth volume corresponds to chapters from Murasaki Shikibu's eleventh-century novel and likely depicts a courtly figure, an intimate interior, or a symbolic moment from the narrative. Mezzotint demands rocking the entire copper plate to a uniform burr, then scraping and burnishing the lighter passages back — a process that yields the velvety blacks and graded half-tones characteristic of Saito's plates. The medium suits the muted register of Heian court life, where suggestion and shadow carry as much weight as line. Saito was largely self-taught in mezzotint and treated the Genji cycle as the central project of his career, building each plate's atmosphere through tonal modulation rather than narrative incident. The series sits within postwar Japanese intaglio alongside the color mezzotints of Hamaguchi Yozo.