Murasaki Shikibu

Murasaki Shikibu, the Heian court attendant who wrote the Genji monogatari, is conventionally depicted at Ishiyama-dera composing the novel by lamplight, brush in hand, scroll unfurled. Mori's version translates this canonical subject into his graphic idiom: the elaborate junihitoe layered robes become a stack of unmodulated color planes separated by heavy outline, the long black hair a single decisive shape descending to the floor. Heian costume, with its prescribed colors and overlapping silks, suits Mori's tendency to construct figures as patterned assemblages rather than modeled volumes. The subject locates the print within his wider engagement with classical Japanese literary and religious figures — alongside warrior gods and historical personalities — that runs in parallel with his Edo townspeople and festival pictures. Within the sosaku-hanga ethos of the artist as sole author of carving, printing, and design, Mori's choice of Murasaki places him in a tradition reaching back through Yoshitoshi's late-nineteenth-century literary heroines to the Heian revival imagery of the Meiji imperial era. Compared to those antecedents, his treatment is markedly flatter and more graphic, refusing the painterly atmospherics of nihonga.