Excerpts from The Tale of Genji

Ono no Ozū (Ono no Tsū)

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Calligraphy in the distinctive style of Ono no Otsū, one of the most prominent woman calligraphers of premodern Japan, graces sheets of decorated paper in this pair of albums with scenes from The Tale of Genji painted by an anonymous Tosa-school artist. Otsū wrote mostly in kana, interspersed with flamboyantly rendered kanji for poetically evocative words. The sometimes subtle, sometimes dramatic variations in the weight of the brushstrokes and the radical spacing between characters and clusters of characters are trademarks of her style. Otsū also demonstrated her mastery of the “scattered writing” technique, whereby she artfully disposed the registers of the poem across the page and sometimes positioned lines of the poem out of sequence.

Asian Art

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Met's collection of Asian art—more than 35,000 objects, ranging in date from the third millennium B.C. to the twenty-first century—is one of the largest and most comprehensive in the world. Each of the many civilizations of Asia is represented by outstanding works, providing an unrivaled experience of the artistic traditions of nearly half the world.

Metropolitan Museum of Art