Old pagoda

A second handling of the pagoda subject, distinct in composition or treatment from the related impression. Pagodas were a sustained preoccupation in Sasajima's work — he returned to the historic Buddhist sites of Nara and Kyoto across more than five decades, producing multiple impressions of the same structures from different vantages. The print likely emphasizes the stacked tiers and projecting eaves as a vertical rhythm of dark carved bands against reserved or tonally modulated [washi](/glossary/washi). [Bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) may register the gradation of timber surfaces or the surrounding atmosphere. Sasajima's commitment to cutting and printing every block himself followed Onchi Koshiro's [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga) doctrine, which held that creative printmaking required unmediated contact between artist and material at every stage. Variants like this one suggest the artist working through the same architectural subject as a renewed compositional problem rather than a fixed image. The rough cherry-grain texture characteristic of his blocks would register in the printed surface as a counterpart to the actual weathering of the centuries-old pagoda timber.