To Otome

The title refers to a specific location or named figure — possibly a pass, a temple, or a personal subject — that situates the image within Sasajima's geography of Buddhist sites and pilgrimage routes. Without further provenance the precise referent is unsettled, but the work would be executed in the artist's standard mokuhanga vocabulary: heavy black ink-blocks defining the principal forms, carved chisel marks integrated into the printed surface, and earth pigments used sparingly if at all. Sasajima carved and printed every block himself, a discipline he held to from his earliest apprenticeship under Onchi Koshiro in the late 1930s through his final decades of work. The piece belongs to the sosaku-hanga tradition's rejection of the Edo-period division of labor between designer, carver, and printer — every mark on the washi is a record of the artist's own hand at the block.