Hahakigi (from In the Garden of Genji)

The second chapter of The Tale of Genji takes its title from the hahakigi, a tree of poetic legend said to be visible from a distance but to vanish on approach — a figure for the elusiveness of the woman Utsusemi, whose evasion of Genji structures the chapter, and a chapter largely occupied by the so-called rainy-night discussion in which young men classify women by type. Miyayama's plate for Hahakigi follows the visual logic established across the series: a flat decorative ground worked in gold leaf, intaglio passages of deep etching, and aquatint tonalities that introduce spatial recession only obliquely. The botanical reference — the broom-tree silhouette as emblematic carrier — anchors the composition to the chapter while preserving the abstracted, sign-like mode by which the cycle codes each volume. Within the arc of In the Garden of Genji, the sheet typifies Miyayama's strategy of compressing each chapter's literary content into a botanical or atmospheric distillation rather than pursuing narrative illustration.