The Dance of Gioh

Giō is the shirabyōshi dancer of the early Kamakura era preserved in the Heike Monogatari, who served as favored entertainer to Taira no Kiyomori before being displaced by the younger Hotoke Gozen and retiring to take Buddhist vows. Mori treats this classical literary subject in his characteristic kappazuri-derived idiom: heavy black contours enclosing flat planes of opaque color, a graphic vocabulary descended from the stencil-dyeing (katazome) tradition Mori absorbed through his association with Keisuke Serizawa and the mingei circle. The shirabyōshi's male court robes, tate-eboshi cap, and fan are reduced to bold silhouette and patterned negative space rather than rendered illusionistically. Mori returned repeatedly to figures from classical literature, Noh, and kabuki across his sosaku-hanga career, working from a Nihonbashi childhood that steeped him in old Edo theatrical culture, and producing each impression himself in keeping with the movement's insistence on sole-author carving and printing.