Yome-dono, Horyu-ji

The Yumedono, or Hall of Dreams, is the octagonal hall in the eastern precinct of Horyu-ji at Ikaruga, built in 739 on the site of Prince Shotoku's residence and housing the secret Guze Kannon. Hiratsuka, who returned often to Horyu-ji as a touchstone of early Japanese Buddhism, would have rendered the eight-sided plan with its distinctive kawara-buki tiled roof, the central jewel-form sorin finial rising from the apex, and the surrounding wooden corridor. The black-and-white mokuhanga reduces the structure to its silhouette and tile rhythms, with the gouge marks of the block reading as the grain of weathered cedar boarding. Such architectural prints were a sustained subject across his career and align his sosaku-hanga practice with the postwar effort, parallel to that of Bruno Taut and Japanese preservationists, to assert the Asuka and Nara monuments as central to a modern national art-historical consciousness.