Crafting a Literati Utopia in 19th-Century Japan: The Plum Blossom Valley at Tsukigase

Dr. Yurika Wakamatsu, assistant professor of East Asian art history at Occidental College, explores Tsukigase, a plum-filled mountain valley in today's Nara Prefecture that came to be celebrated as a paradisiacal site in nineteenth-century Japan. Tracing Tsukigase's transformations during this period, Dr. Wakamatsu examines how poets and painters who worked in the Sino-Japanese mode of literati art constructed a fleeting, utopian realm of reclusion by imbuing this remote landscape with imagery drawn from beloved works of Chinese literature.

Image credit: Okuhara Seiko, Plum Blossoms in Tsukigase Valley (detail), 1896, handscroll, ink and colors on silk, 28.4 x 508.2 cm. Koga City Museum of History