The First Pull from the Block

When you carve a woodblock, you spend the whole afternoon working in reverse and in the negative. Every line you want to keep is a narrow ridge of mountain cherrywood you have to cut around; every open sky or patch of water is a valley you gouge away with a U-chisel so it will stay silent and un-inked. While the curls of amber wood shavings pile up around your knuckles, the block itself looks dark, scarred, and backwards—a mirror-world of wet Prussian blue and vermilion islands where the bridge arches from the wrong bank and the moon leans the wrong way.

You never really know what you have made until you brush the rice paste and pigment across the cherrywood, drop a damp sheet of mulberry washi onto the two chiselled kento registration notches in the margin, and rub the braided bamboo baren in firm circles across the back of the paper.

Then comes the single quiet second the whole afternoon was built for: setting the baren down on the bench, lifting one corner of the damp sheet, and peeling it back into the low October sun. As the paper arches up off the wood, the sunlight catches the wet ink through the long mulberry fibers, the gouge tracks in the valleys disappear, and the whole scene flips itself the right way around in the air.