Suetsumuhana (from In the Garden of Genji)
末摘花
- Medium:
- Aquatint, deep etching, gold leaf
- Image courtesy of
- Hiroaki Miyayama Official Site — In the Garden of Genji
末摘花
The chapter's title, literally tip-plucking flower, names the safflower (benibana), whose red dye gives the plant its association with the color of the nose of the impoverished princess Genji discovers in the chapter — a gentle joke embedded in the title itself. The figure is recalled as a comic and sympathetic portrait, the only one of Genji's encounters explicitly played for humor. Miyayama's print for Suetsumuhana takes the safflower as its central botanical motif, the thistle-headed bloom rendered in deep etching with aquatint tonality and set against passages of gold leaf, in keeping with the series' material program. The flat decorative ground references the kirikane and applied-gold conventions of traditional Genji-e while the intaglio surface introduces a contemporary graphic register. As one of the early sheets in In the Garden of Genji, Suetsumuhana follows the cycle's emblematic logic: each chapter is condensed to a single botanical sign, here a flower whose color ties directly to the chapter's narrative joke.
![[Garden of] Taj Mahal, No. 1 (Taji Maharu no niwa, dai ichi) by Hiroshi Yoshida](https://www.artic.edu/iiif/2/230993a7-d4f0-c979-c267-127d48e1ef1c/full/843,/0/default.jpg)
Taji Maharu no niwa, dai ichi
1931
Color woodblock print; oban
January 1938
Woodblock print, ink and color on paper
1938
Color woodblock print; oban
10/70, 1966
Woodblock print
Suetsumuhana (from In the Garden of Genji) (末摘花) was created by Hiroaki Miyayama (宮山 広明).
Suetsumuhana (from In the Garden of Genji) depicts gardens and literary.
