Poem by Sarumaru Dayū

Poem by Sarumaru Dayū, designed around 1835, illustrates a verse from the Hyakunin isshu anthology that describes a deer crying among autumn maples deep in the mountains. Katsushika Hokusai responds to this most famous of poetic images with a panoramic mountain landscape divided by a gleaming river, with deer scattered along the slopes and travelers crossing the foreground bridge. The print belongs to his unfinished series One Hundred Poems by One Hundred Poets Explained by the Nurse (Hyakunin isshu uba ga etoki), in which courtly verse becomes the pretext for sweeping observations of Japanese terrain. The composition uses bands of warm autumn russet, sharp blue river, and pale distant peaks to organize space, drawing the eye from the foreground bridge to the high blue ridges in three carefully calibrated steps. The Art Institute of Chicago impression captures the soft moss greens and rust browns that distinguish well-printed sheets from this series. As a ukiyo-e print, Sarumaru Dayū exemplifies Hokusai's late conviction that landscape itself could carry the emotional weight of classical poetry. Hokusai does not depict the courtier-poet himself but instead trusts the visual texture of autumn mountains to evoke the verse's mood of solitude and the deer's mournful cry. The Edo ukiyo-e print also shows the maturity of his color block design, with each pigment doing both pictorial and atmospheric work. Collectors and scholars regard the surviving sheets of this incomplete series as some of the most ambitious and least understood among Katsushika Hokusai's later projects, and Sarumaru Dayū is consistently cited as one of its most striking interpretations.