Black cat

Black Cat is one of three compositions on this theme in Ishikawa Toraji's 1934 series Rajo Jusshu (Ten Types of Female Nudes). Pairing a nude figure with a black cat invokes a motif with deep roots in Western painting — Manet's Olympia is the obvious antecedent — and Ishikawa's adoption of the subject signals his fluency with European salon conventions absorbed during his yoga training at the Tokyo Fine Arts School. The compositional contrast between the cat's solid black shape and the gradated flesh of the figure would have demanded careful registration across multiple blocks, with the cat printed from a flat key block and the body built up through layered bokashi. The interior setting — likely a contemporary Western-style room rather than a traditional Japanese interior — reinforces the print's hybrid character. Within shin-hanga, where animals usually appeared in kacho-e bird-and-flower prints, Ishikawa's pairing of nude and cat reads as a deliberate citation of the European figure tradition.