Kanaya - Tokaidô

Kanaya was the twenty-fourth post station on the Edo-period Tokaido road, located on the western bank of the Ōi River in present-day Shizuoka Prefecture. The station was historically defined by the river crossing, where porters carried travelers and goods across the unbridgeable current. Sekino's Kanaya belongs to his Fifty-Three Stations of the Tokaido series, a sustained project undertaken from 1960 to 1974 that reinterpreted Hiroshige's nineteenth-century cycle through a modern sosaku-hanga sensibility. Where Hiroshige worked through commercial publishers and a division of labor, Sekino carved his own blocks and pulled impressions by hand on washi using a baren, in line with the movement's commitment to single authorship across every stage of production. The image combines flat fields of opaque color with carefully placed bokashi gradations, drawing on his control of layered impressions. Within the Tokaido cycle Sekino moves away from anecdotal staffage toward atmospheric observation of place, reducing figures or omitting them to foreground riverbank, architecture, and weather. The series occupied much of the second half of his career and stands among the most extensive sosaku-hanga reworkings of the classical meisho-e tradition.