Poetry of the Katsura river

The Katsura River flows southwest of Kyoto past the Katsura Imperial Villa and Arashiyama, a stretch carrying classical literary associations: it appears in the Tales of Ise, in waka anthologies, and in The Tale of Genji's "Matsukaze" chapter. The "poetry of" titling signals Hashimoto's intent to evoke the river not as topographical record but as a place inflected by centuries of verse. Such literary landscapes within [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga) depart from the earlier [meisho-e](/glossary/meisho-e) tradition by treating the site as personal interpretation rather than guidebook image. Hashimoto would have employed multiple blocks for water, banks, and distant hills, with [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) gradations suggesting river mist and recession into mountains. As with his architectural work, the print emphasizes compositional structure — the river's path, framing trees, perhaps a bridge or the silhouette of distant Arashiyama — over incidental detail. Hashimoto carved and printed every block himself, in keeping with the sosaku-hanga commitment to single-author production that he maintained from the 1930s onward.