About the Artwork
Sarumaru Dayū is a Japanese woodblock print by Katsushika Hokusai, created in the 1830s for his late series One Hundred Poems Explained by the Nurse (Hyakunin isshu uba ga etoki). The image responds to Sarumaru Dayū’s famous waka, in which the cry of a stag heard deep in the mountains sharpens the sadness of autumn.
The composition is built on quiet narrative rather than portraiture. A deer stands on a hillside amid red maples in the top left, while the landscape opens out to include human figures and a dwelling, details that root the poem’s emotional register in lived terrain. Hokusai’s colour and line are economical but exacting: autumn foliage gathers in clustered rhythm, and the slope of the hill directs the eye toward the deer as the scene’s emotional centre - an animal made monumental not by size, but by attention.
Rather than illustrating the poem as a literary scene, Hokusai translates it into an atmosphere. The deer’s cry is inaudible, yet the print is structured as if around a sound: space opens, figures diminish, and the season seems to press forward. The result is a landscape where melancholy is not performed, but felt - embedded in distance, in fading light, in the sense of life moving on beyond the viewer’s reach.
Today, Sarumaru Dayū resonates as a meditation on how emotion arises from the environment - how weather, season, and place can shape inner life without spectacle. In a culture of constant noise and explanation, this print insists on a quieter truth: some forms of sadness arrive not through events, but through perception - through noticing the world change, and recognising yourself changing with it.
About the Artist
