Sekiya (from In the Garden of Genji)

The sixteenth chapter takes its title from the gatehouse at the Osaka Barrier (Ausaka no seki), the pass between the capital and the eastern provinces, where Genji and his former lover Utsusemi cross paths by chance as her husband's procession returns to Kyoto. Miyayama's print likely evokes the chapter through the architecture of the barrier — a tiled roofline, a bamboo blind, or the wheel and shafts of a court ox-carriage — against the autumn maple leaves the chapter's poetry repeatedly invokes. The deep-etched line is well suited to the geometry of post-and-beam construction, while aquatint passages give the foliage and atmospheric ground their density. Sekiya is among the shorter chapters of the Genji, and Miyayama's treatment of it generally responds in kind, operating as a quiet interlude within the larger cycle of the In the Garden of Genji series.