Most reverently and with awe, I have humbly and undeservedly received the eloquent, painstaking prefaces of my two revered masters, Yanagi Sōetsu¹ and Umehara Ryūzaburō² — this is the supreme adornment, deep and inexhaustible.
This book is the first book of mine to be completed as a pure collection of hanga (woodblock prints), and it is precious for its earnest, single-minded significance.
In fear and awe I say: the nation met with calamity, and, bathed in its leaping flames, was made clean; and I do not regard it as a loss that nothing of my defiled, entire self was left remaining.
The shadowed carving-marks of the woodblocks that became flame turned, further, into hanga; and the supreme thing that has become this book is, I believe, a beautiful great bodhi-flower offered to the woodblocks themselves.
For my temporary dwelling until I go out to Tokyo, I give my whole body over to this Zakke-dō Hall, called Aizen-en, in Fukumitsu-machi, Toyama Prefecture, and there, setting my heart firm, welling up and sinking down in joy, I go on carving into hanga the resonance of the great heaven and the great earth.
Praying that hanga itself is Life, I do nothing but stride across, from this shore toward the far shore.
February 22, 1947, at the Shingama — from Munakata Shikō's afterword.
※The frontispiece is a woodblock print bearing Munakata's seal.
¹ Yanagi Sōetsu (1889–1961) — founder of the Mingei (folk-craft) movement; an early champion of Munakata's work.
² Umehara Ryūzaburō (1888–1986) — leading Western-style (yōga) painter of modern Japan.
