Pine Field at Miho

Miho no Matsubara is the famous pine grove on the Miho Peninsula in Shizuoka, a designated Site of Scenic Beauty traditionally viewed alongside Mount Fuji and associated with the Noh play Hagoromo, in which a celestial maiden's feathered robe is hung from a pine. Morimura's print renders the dense formation of black-pine trunks with patterned baren-burnished texture, each tree distinguished by individual silhouette while collectively forming a rhythmic vertical screen. The interplay of trunk patterns against sand or distant water reveals his interest in nature as ordered geometric form. Continuing the meisho-e tradition that paired Miho with Mount Fuji in countless prints by Hokusai and Hiroshige, Morimura strips the subject of its conventional distant peak to focus instead on the textured forest itself. The result is consistent with his wider body of work, in which celebrated landscape sites are reframed through close-range pattern and decorative restraint.