Sakanoshita

Sakanoshita is the forty-eighth station of the Tokaido, located at the foot of the Suzuka Mountains in present-day Mie Prefecture. Hiroshige depicted the station with a dramatic backdrop of Fudesutezan, the 'throw-away brush mountain,' so named because the painter Kano Motonobu allegedly cast aside his brush in despair at being unable to capture its form. Sekino's print, drawn from his Tokaido series begun in the early 1960s, revisits the station through the formal vocabulary of sosaku-hanga: self-carved blocks, broad areas of flat color, and confident compositional simplification. Mountains are typically reduced to overlapping silhouettes, with bokashi gradation suggesting atmospheric depth and time of day. Where Hiroshige's audience consumed mass-produced commercial prints, Sekino's editions were limited and signed in the Western manner. The work belongs to a postwar generation of printmakers who treated the historical Tokaido subject as an opportunity for individual artistic interpretation rather than topographical record.