The path through Mount Utsu

RINPA tradition

This representative example of Rinpa painting illustrates a scene from Tales of Ise, a tenthcentury Japanese anthology of stories and poems about a nobleman's romantic pursuits. In this episode the hero, usually identified as the poet Ariwara Narihira (825–880), is on a journey through the mountains. While on a road described as "overgrown with ivy vines and maples," he encounters a Buddhist monk travelling in the opposite direction. He asks the monk to deliver this poem to a woman he left behind in the capital:

Beside Mt. Utsu
In Suruga
I can see you
Neither waking
Nor, alas, even in my dreams.
(Translation by Helen McCullough)

The artist conveys the mystery of this brief encounter by isolating the nobleman between rounded hills, where he gazes back at the monk's retreating figure. On the hillside red ivy provides a hint of the season, fall. Signature elements of the Rinpa style seen here are the reduction of landscape to a few simple, abstract elements; emphasis on sensuous curving forms, defined in color rather than outline; and use of the technique known as tarashikomi, in which ink or pigment is pooled on an already wet surface.