Eawase (from In the Garden of Genji)

Eawase, "A Picture Contest," is the seventeenth chapter of Murasaki Shikibu's Genji monogatari, in which two factions at court vie before the Reizei emperor by presenting paired paintings for judgment. Miyayama's print belongs to the long-running In the Garden of Genji series, in which each of the fifty-four chapters yields a discrete plate. Rather than narrating the chapter's events, the image compresses its mood and material referents — unrolled handscrolls, lacquered cases, the aesthetics of court connoisseurship — into a flattened, emblematic composition. Deep etching produces the raised plate-mark and embossed contours characteristic of Miyayama's intaglio process; aquatint generates the tonal grounds; and applied gold leaf, burnished into the plate impression, supplies a reflective decorative field that recalls the gilt screens (kinpaku byōbu) of the Momoyama and Edo periods. The resulting surface aligns Miyayama with the rinpa decorative lineage rather than with the print traditions of nishiki-e or sōsaku-hanga, situating his Genji series as a contemporary intaglio response to the painted yamato-e tradition.