Page from Hagoromo (Feathered Robe), Shôwa period, circa 1984-1986

Near the conclusion of Matsubara's Hagoromo series, this page likely depicts the final dissolution of the celestial maiden into the heavens — her form now nearly indistinguishable from cloud and sky. The Noh play ends with the tennin vanishing from mortal perception, and Matsubara's printmaking vocabulary of simplified forms and tonal gradation is well-suited to rendering this disappearance. The composition may show only vestigial traces of the figure: a curve of drapery, an echo of the feathered robe, absorbed into a field of graded tone. This kind of reductive image-making draws on the ma — the meaningful empty space — that characterizes both Noh performance and the Japanese visual arts more broadly. As an artist committed to the sosaku-hanga principle of complete authorial control over the image, Matsubara brings a meditative intensity to this final act of letting go, the carved block itself becoming a surface on which presence and absence are held in balance.