Fujitsubo (from In the Garden of Genji)

Fujitsubo names the empress in whose Heian-court chamber wisteria (fuji) bloomed — Genji's stepmother and the object of his forbidden attachment; she resembles his deceased mother and bears him a son who will be raised as the emperor's. The character is closely identified with the wisteria of her palace residence. Miyayama's plate for Fujitsubo concentrates on cascading wisteria as the emblematic carrier, the pendulous panicles described in deep etched line and aquatint, with gold leaf applied to flat passages of the surrounding ground. The technique unites contemporary intaglio process with the decorative idiom of medieval and Edo-period Genji-e, in which botanical motifs encoded the volumes of the romance. Within In the Garden of Genji, the Fujitsubo sheet belongs to the cluster of prints in which a single named flower carries the chapter's literary content; the wisteria here functions both as the character's identifying flora and as a marker of the courtly setting in which the clandestine attachment unfolds.