Mt Fuji in the clouds

Here Fuji is shown partly veiled, the summit emerging through a band of cloud — a long-standing convention in Japanese landscape printmaking that Sasajima reinterprets through the [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga) vocabulary. Rather than achieving cloud cover with the soft, ink-loaded [baren](/glossary/baren) [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) that Hiroshige and Hokusai used, Sasajima typically carves the cloud as a positive shape: a region of unprinted or lightly inked [washi](/glossary/washi) cutting horizontally across the dark mass of the mountain. The peak above the clouds and the slopes below register as separate flat tonal blocks, the woodgrain visible in each. This produces a print that is structurally legible at a distance — clearly a mountain in cloud — yet, on close inspection, reveals itself as a constructed assembly of carved planks rather than an atmospheric illusion. The treatment is consistent with the principles Sasajima inherited from Onchi: the print is honest to its materials, and the cloud is a carved fact, not a rendered effect.