Hotaru (from In the Garden of Genji)

Hotaru, "The Fireflies," is the twenty-fifth chapter, named for the episode in which Genji conceals fireflies in a folded sleeve and releases them in the dim interior of his adopted daughter Tamakazura's chamber, briefly illuminating her for the suitor Prince Hotaru. Miyayama's plate gives the chapter its purest visual reduction: scattered points of light against a darkened ground, the fireflies isolated as luminous accents within a still composition. Deep etching here produces the raised, slightly metallic-feeling marks that Miyayama uses for highlight elements throughout the series, while aquatint supplies the surrounding tonal field. Gold leaf, applied flat, simultaneously echoes and contradicts the night-time setting, converting darkness into a decorative ground in the manner of nocturnal screen paintings of the Edo period. Among the In the Garden of Genji prints, Hotaru belongs to a subset in which a single luminous or ephemeral motif — fireflies, dew, blossoms about to fall — concentrates the chapter's atmosphere into a lyric rather than narrative form.