Umezawa Manor in Sagami Province (Sōshū Umezawa-zai)

From the Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji of around 1830, this Katsushika Hokusai print shows the flatlands of Umezawa Manor in Sagami Province (modern-day Kanagawa), where a flight of cranes wades and takes flight among the marshes as Mount Fuji rises in the distance. The composition presents the foreground as a horizontal band of water-meadows, with the cranes occupying the middle ground in a stately rhythm of standing and flying figures, and Fuji floating beyond, half veiled in early-morning mist. As an Edo ukiyo-e print, the sheet exemplifies the more lyrical mode of the Fuji series, in which animal life and uninhabited landscape replace the human laboring scenes that dominate other prints. The Victoria and Albert Museum preserves an impression in its Hokusai collection. The choice of Umezawa Manor is significant; the Sagami plain was known both for its wetlands and for the social register of its inhabitants, and Hokusai uses the cranes both as a sign of place and as a literary symbol of longevity and aristocratic refinement. The juxtaposition of cranes with Fuji compresses two of the most powerful images of auspiciousness in Japanese visual culture into a single sheet. The composition rests on a careful tonal recession from the foreground greens and browns to the soft blue of the mountain, while the cranes themselves are picked out in clean white with black accents, becoming the visual hinge between near and far. The print continues to be admired for its quietness and for the way Hokusai succeeds in making a subject that might be merely decorative carry the same gravity as his more dramatic landscapes.