The day when the wintry wind comes

The day when the wintry wind comes (kogarashi, the dry season-turning wind of late autumn) renders weather as event rather than scene. Hagiwara's approach to such a subject is typically non-narrative: the sheet becomes a field of directional pressure, with linear striations cut into the block to register the wind's passage and broad bokashi gradations carrying the bruised palette of an overcast sky. The deliberate visibility of woodgrain — pulled by the baren across multiple impressions — gives a tactile presence to air itself, a hallmark of his sosaku-hanga practice in which every block is conceived, carved, and printed by the artist. The title aligns the print with classical Japanese seasonal sensibility, where named winds carry literary weight, while the visual language remains firmly within postwar abstraction. Within Hagiwara's body of work it sits alongside other meteorological subjects in which weather, rather than place, becomes the print's primary content, advancing the expressive range that distinguished his generation of mokuhanga from the earlier shin-hanga school.