Utsusemi (from In the Garden of Genji)

Utsusemi, the title of the third chapter, names both the woman who slips away from Genji and the cast-off shell of the cicada — the empty robe she leaves behind on her bed, an image the chapter's poem makes explicit. The cicada's molted shell as figure for absence and the ephemeral has long served Japanese poetry, and Miyayama draws on it in this sheet of In the Garden of Genji. Combining deep etching for incised contour, aquatint for tonal field, and applied gold leaf for the surrounding ground, the print follows the series' standard material vocabulary, in which the gilded surface evokes the decorative grounds of historical Genji-e screens while the intaglio lines impose a contemporary graphic register. The cicada or its shell as a discrete iconographic element distinguishes this plate from the predominantly botanical sheets in the cycle. Among Miyayama's earlier responses in the series, Utsusemi exemplifies the procedure by which a single literary symbol is made to carry the chapter.