Pagoda

Pagoda enters Sasajima's central subject. Across more than five decades he returned to Buddhist architecture as his consuming theme, and the multi-storey pagoda -- with its repeated tiered roofs and stacked geometry -- offered him a natural carving problem. The image likely isolates the structure against open ground or sky, allowing the silhouette to be read in clean horizontal courses of curved roof eave above straight wall. Sasajima's gouge work tends toward direct, frontal description; bokashi gradations would be sparse. He preferred the graphic clarity of flat blocks pulled by his own hand to the atmospheric softening favoured by shin-hanga contemporaries. Carved-line work would emphasise the rhythm of timber bracketing, finial, and sloping eave. The print belongs to a sustained pagoda strand that ran across Sasajima's career, including studies of named pagodas at Horyu-ji, Yakushi-ji, and elsewhere. Every block was designed, carved, and printed by Sasajima alone, in the tradition of artist-as-complete-maker that Onchi Koshiro had defined for the sosaku-hanga movement.