Ephemeral Impressions Left by the Tides of Ink

Kumoi-Zakura│via Wikimedia Commons│© Hiroshi yoshida

An artist spies on a silent woman, preserved in the timeless ritual of styling her hair. She sits in relaxed seiza-style as her ankles slightly splay to the sides. A solitary eye is visible through a reflection in a mirror, and, with that eye, the artist illustrates a story of Japan flowing with introverted tides of emotion.

This is Hakuho Hirano’s girl, Before the Mirror. A Shin Hanga woodblock print.

Undying Devotion to a Floating World

Japanese woodblock printing was an art form that took the Hon'ne (translated: the true sounds) of one’s internal feelings and desires and lightened the shadow of Tatemae (translated: the façade) built in front. It captured stills amidst the rapids. It influenced and influences. It provides the eyes of today with a fragmented mirage of the past.

It is difficult to discuss woodblock printing and not mention the ukiyo-e period (translated: pictures of the floating world). These prints effortlessly capture the ephemeral beauty in everyday pleasures and were often composed with a dreamlike or unexpected viewpoint. They express the fleeting, the mono no aware – or poetic sense of impermanence and subtle emotion - and ritualised beauty woven into everyday life. The period was more than an aesthetic lens; it was a way of living. The ukiyo-e interpretation is delicate, portraying a Japan poised and self-assured in its elegance, steeped in its traditions. It depicts a Japan before it faced its greatest fear: the threat of change and alternatives.

Shin-Hanga (translated: new prints) emerged in the early 20th century as the ambivalent successor to the ethereal ukiyo-e. It served as a silken thread of dialogue – strong and beautiful - documenting Japan’s evolving identity as revered traditions encountered a cultural “invasion” - the arrival of the West, coarse and disruptive. Shin-Hanga represented a shield of artistic resistance, preserving the sanctity of the floating world against the tide of modernization.

Hirano’s girl Before the Mirror captures the momentary beauty of youth and the subtle evocation in daily life, yet it is unmistakably a Shin-Hanga print. The girl’s solitary eye is framed as she sits Before the Mirror preserved in an unbroken, crisp reflection. She is an isolated blossom forever anticipating the fated touch of time. Yet her beauty transcends the inevitable comings of seasons, and instead it is the furnishings that have fallen victim to age – a mirror produced using western technology, fashioned in the style of the mid-1800s to early 1900s.

A mirror that encapsulates the ephemeral, but it can never touch it.

Bound by Ink

Woodblock print is a child born from ink; literature is its sibling. They are forms that connect the physical eye and the inner mind’s eye - one illustrates a picture within the mind, the other narrates a story. Literature is parented by culture, married to lived experience and chained to politics. Naturally, it offered its womb to Shin Hanga.

A man whose freshwater words were steeped in the seas of woodblock printing, and in turn, the ink seeped into the art form of literature. Jun’ichirou Tanizaki (1886-1965) welcomed the tides of Shin-Hanga. Tanizaki’s novels are bound to beauty, sensuality and impermanence. His novel, The Makioka Sisters, paints a nuanced portrait that mirrors the floating world caught in the midst of change, highlighting the tensions between tradition and modernity. Within his literature is space to explore the narratives behind the images depicted in woodblock prints. Rather than carving into wood, his words are carefully positioned in the minds of his readers and fall into place like “a shower of cherry petals [that] was falling, to decorate their kimono sleeves,” located in a “house [that] was for the most part Japanese.”

The Makioka Sisters operates as a literary Shin-hanga offering vivid domestic scenes and seasonal rituals from a dreamlike veiwpoint that is anchored in tradition. It is a Samurai honouring Bushido (translated: way of the warrior), preserving the sanctity of the floating world alongside its sibling.

It reminds us that no matter the form. The act of creation is the devotion to reverence.

Jun’ichirou Tanizaki│via Wikimedia Commons

A Mother and Daughter

A devoted society that once transcended the turning of the seasons. Rather than being caressed into switching tenderly from the birth of springtime to lazy summers, Japan was drowned in the unfaltering rains of autumn – Shin Hanga, as we know, was a tide.

The Makioka Sisters narrates the quiet unravelling of a traditional Japanese family as their values are tested and gently torn apart amid the encroaching tide of the West – a new age in which a single raindrop unsympathetically gathers into a tsunami. Tanizaki paints the family with delicate precision as the inevitable season presses upon their placidity; “the autumn rain, which had been falling for several days, beat against the glass doors at the veranda. The little garden sloped gently off to a mountain stream and all down the slope autumn hagi, beginning to shed its blossoms, was pounded at by the rain.”

 The Japanese national flower is the Sakura (translation: cherry blossom), a reminder of the fragility and transient nature of life. But in this instance, Tanizaki does not reference the Sakura; he references the Hagi (translation: Japanese bush flower) – an autumnal symbol associated with the fog of melancholy and the weight of unrequited love. A slight, confident flower surrenders its centre to be pounded by the rain yet perseveres. In the context of the novel, this description is used as the eldest daughter, Sachiko, remembers her mother’s passing, aged 36, a blossom that had fully bloomed. Only to be lost. The mother is a literary woodblock print of elegance recollected from the haze of memory. A beauty. A woman of ephemerality taken too soon, too abruptly, unable to love her children, yet leaving a lasting legacy. One that is still “pounded at by the rain.”

The mother’s essence of ukiyo-e sensibility is passed to her second daughter, Yukiko, a lone blossom persevering the frost yet anticipating its fated touch. The novel follows her futile attempts and inevitable rejections of marriage, and concludes with her morose union to an older, aristocratic man touched by time – a man who could not outrun the changing seasons - a reflection, a mirror to Yukiko not unlike the solitary eye visible in Hirano’s print. Forever anticipating.

Like the hagi, the mother opened herself to the world and was pounded by its weather. Yukiko, in turn, has not yet fallen — but she leans, delicate and bending, under the same endless rain.

Looking Past Reflections

An artist spies on a silent woman, and an author watches a falling family. Capturing the fleeting with ink defines the values of the ukiyo-e, and yet Shin Hanga is defined by the observation of the tidal wave attempting to drown the ephemeral.

Undoubtedly, there is a paradox of capturing the fleeting in preserving beauty that is defined by its fragility. Yet without their preservation, the prints and prose would not stand as guardians of the floating world. The dreamlike haze in which we observe the impermanence and subtle emotion would be lost, and the value would be forgotten as transforming traditions surrender. We would not be able to revere their beauty as we can see today, their essence has been worn by modernity.

The floating world reminds us that beauty is not a relic to be locked behind glass, nor a fleeting image to be consumed and forgotten. It is a living conversation, a ritual and a reinvention. It must breathe, fade and return in new forms.

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