March Cherry blossoms by moonlight

The print depicts sakura at night under a March moon, the moment in early spring when blossoms register as a luminous mass against a dark sky. Cherry-blossom-and-moon subjects sit at the edge of kachô-e — the bird-and-flower category of traditional ukiyo-e — and have a long lineage from Hokusai and Hiroshige through Yoshida Hiroshi and the shin-hanga publishers. Sekino, working in the sosaku-hanga tradition, treats the subject through self-carved and self-printed colour blocks rather than the publisher-led shin-hanga workshop model. Night scenes of this kind typically depend on a deeply inked sky, often realised through repeated impressions of dark blue or grey-black bokashi, with the blossoms held as reserved or lightly tinted areas of washi and the moon as a circular reserve. The sheet's appearance as a numbered variant within the catalogue indicates the existence of related impressions or states by the same artist on the same theme, consistent with his small-edition working method.