Yatsuhashi IX

The title Yatsuhashi — 'eight bridges' — references the celebrated passage in the Tales of Ise in which the protagonist crosses a zigzag plank bridge through a marsh of irises at Yatsuhashi in Mikawa Province. The motif has a long pictorial history in Japan, from Ogata Kōrin's screen paintings to Edo-period woodblock impressions, where iris and angled bridge become emblems of poetic exile and seasonal feeling. Nakazawa's IX, the ninth treatment of the subject, indicates a sustained engagement rather than a single quotation. A mokuhanga handling would likely emphasize the planar geometry of the bridge against a worked field of water or foliage, exploiting the medium's capacity for flat, saturated color, bokashi gradations, and crisp linear edges. Read against Nakazawa's wider practice — much of which addresses surface, light, and the residue of antiquity through metal leaf and oxidation — the Yatsuhashi sequence connects his formal concerns to a classical Japanese subject, allowing geometric structure to emerge from one of the canonical motifs of premodern poetry and design rather than from pure abstraction.