Harvesting

The title points to a rural labor scene at season's end—rice cutters in a paddy, or figures bundling sheaves and stacking them on the wooden drying frames (inakake) used across the Japanese countryside. Such genre prints typically rely on a flattened spatial structure and broad blocks of earth-toned color, with bokashi shading applied along the horizon to suggest a low autumn sky. Working within the sosaku-hanga ideal of jiga-jikoku-jizuri, Sekino designed, carved, and printed each block himself on washi, giving the surface its matte, slightly granular finish. Harvest scenes belong to his broader engagement with the working life of provincial Japan, an interest grounded in his Aomori upbringing and developed in parallel with the portraits, theater prints, and Tokaido road series for which he is more widely known.