Kuruma Arasoi (A Quarrel of Vehicles)

Kuruma Arasoi depicts the carriage confrontation drawn from the Aoi chapter of the Genji monogatari, in which the attendants of Lady Aoi and Lady Rokujo struggle for prime viewing position at the Kamo Festival procession. Mori favored such moments of physical, narrative tension, with bodies straining against one another at the harness shafts. The composition almost certainly relies on his characteristic vocabulary of broad, unmodulated color blocks bounded by emphatic black contours derived from his work in kappazuri stencil dyeing, a technique he carried into mokuhanga. Architectural elements of the ox-carts — wheels, eaves, drawn curtains — would have been reduced to graphic, near-heraldic shapes. Mori repeatedly returned to subjects from classical literature and kabuki throughout the postwar decades, treating them with the directness of folk art rather than the courtly delicacy of earlier ukiyo-e renderings. As a sosaku-hanga printmaker, he carved and printed the blocks himself, and the firm registration of plain washi against densely inked passages typifies the muscular hand-printed surface he sought.