Hodogaya - Tokaidô

Hodogaya was the fourth post station on the Tôkaidô, the great coastal highway linking Edo (Tokyo) and Kyoto, and it figures prominently in Sekino's own multi-decade Fifty-Three Stations of the Tôkaidô series, begun in the 1960s in conscious dialogue with Hiroshige's nineteenth-century treatment of the same route. Where Hiroshige favored panoramic vista and seasonal anecdote, Sekino as a leading sôsaku-hanga (creative print) artist self-carved and self-printed his blocks, building dense, painterly surfaces from layered key blocks and broad color blocks rather than the pictorial conventions of ukiyo-e meisho-e. A Hodogaya print from this cycle typically isolates a quiet structural motif — a tea-house gate, a stretch of pine-lined road, a roofline against hills — rendered in muted earth tones with carefully judged bokashi gradations across the sky or distant ground. The composition rewards close looking at the woodgrain Sekino frequently allowed to register in flat areas, an explicitly modernist gesture asserting the materiality of the block.