Asagao (from In the Garden of Genji)
朝顔
- Medium:
- Aquatint, deep etching, gold leaf
- Image courtesy of
- Hiroaki Miyayama Official Site — In the Garden of Genji
朝顔
Asagao, "The Morning Glory," is the twentieth chapter of the Genji, in which Genji's prolonged courtship of Princess Asagao ends in her firm refusal — a rare reversal in the protagonist's amorous career, framed throughout by the ephemeral morning glory after which the princess takes her sobriquet. Miyayama's print isolates the asagao bloom as its visual subject, the flower's curling vines and trumpet-shaped corolla rendered through deep etching's raised embossing and aquatint's flat tonal grounds. Gold leaf supplies the decorative field, in keeping with his treatment of every plate in In the Garden of Genji. The morning glory was a botanical preoccupation across late Edo and Meiji print culture — particularly within kachō-e — and Miyayama's contemporary intaglio handling reorients the flower toward the rinpa idiom of bold silhouette and abbreviated pictorial space. Within the series, Asagao belongs to the cluster of chapter-prints in which a single seasonal flower or grass carries the emotional charge of an entire chapter, the bloom standing in for a courtly identity that Genji is unable to possess.
![[Garden of] Taj Mahal, No. 1 (Taji Maharu no niwa, dai ichi) by Hiroshi Yoshida](https://www.artic.edu/iiif/2/230993a7-d4f0-c979-c267-127d48e1ef1c/full/843,/0/default.jpg)
Taji Maharu no niwa, dai ichi
1931
Color woodblock print; oban
January 1938
Woodblock print, ink and color on paper
1938
Color woodblock print; oban
10/70, 1966
Woodblock print
Asagao (from In the Garden of Genji) (朝顔) was created by Hiroaki Miyayama (宮山 広明).
Asagao (from In the Garden of Genji) depicts gardens and literary.
