Asagao (from In the Garden of Genji)

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.