To the morning light

The title indicates a dawn scene, with figure or landscape oriented toward rising light — a composition implying directional movement out of darkness and toward illumination. Yumeji's mokuhanga handling of such a subject would depend on bokashi gradation to render the soft tonal transition across the sky, the printer working successive blocks to build a graduated wash of color from horizon upward. Dawn imagery in his work tends to pair the optimism of new light with a residual undertone of melancholy, the figure half in shadow and half in early sun. The print shares preoccupations with other transitional-light subjects in his catalogue: the threshold between night and day, sleep and waking, withdrawal and reentry into the social world. The Taisho Roman sensibility Yumeji helped define drew much of its emotional charge from precisely such liminal moments rather than from full daylight or full night.