The Milky Way (B)

The Milky Way (B) is one of Joichi Hoshi's celestial tree images, in which a single tree is set against a star-strewn sky rather than the open ground or moon-disc grounds of his other compositions. The (B) suffix indicates a variant or second state in a small group of related compositions on the same theme, a common pattern in his late catalog where Hoshi reworked motifs across multiple blocks and color schemes. The starfield was typically achieved through dense overprinting of fine white or metallic points across a dark blue or near-black ground, giving the upper register the granular density that reads at a distance as a continuous band of light. The tree itself would have been carved with sharp silhouetting and worked with karazuri embossing on the trunk, lifting the bark into low relief. Produced in the sosaku-hanga tradition, every block was cut and printed by Hoshi himself on washi, in modest editions pulled by baren.