Mt Fuji

The third in Sasajima's recurring Fuji studies, this print continues his serial reworking of the mountain through changes in carving register, ink choice, or composition. Sasajima typically resolved Fuji into two or three flat tonal areas: the dark, broadly carved mass of the peak; a lighter foreground band suggesting plain or lake; and an unprinted or lightly inked sky where the plank's grain reads through. He worked in oban-scale and larger formats on absorbent washi, pressing the block by hand with a baren in the sosaku-hanga manner he absorbed under Onchi Koshiro. The lineage matters: where ukiyo-e Fuji was a collaborative product of designer, carver, and printer, Sasajima's Fuji is the work of one pair of hands from drawing through final impression. Returning to the subject a third time was characteristic — like his repeated visits to the Nara temples, he treated motifs as problems to be re-solved rather than pictures to be reproduced.