Hiratsuka

Hiratsuka was the seventh of the Tôkaidô's fifty-three post stations, traditionally associated in earlier ukiyo-e with the silhouette of nearby Kôraiyama and the Banyû River crossing. Sekino's Hiratsuka belongs to the same long Tôkaidô series in which he reworked Hiroshige's itinerary through a modernist lens, replacing narrative incident with a more architectural, almost still-life sensibility. The mokuhanga is built from multiple impressions on absorbent washi, with each color separately registered and burnished by baren; Sekino's surfaces often retain visible woodgrain, evidence of the sôsaku-hanga commitment to letting the medium speak. Compositions for Hiratsuka in his cycle typically isolate a single structure or roadside detail under a broad, lightly graded sky in bokashi, the palette restrained to ochres, indigos, and warm grays. The print situates Sekino in the postwar generation that took up Edo-period subjects without ukiyo-e's commercial workshop apparatus, treating each station as an opportunity for personal interpretation rather than topographic record.