Shono - Tokaidô

From Sekino's reinterpretation of the Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō, a series he worked on between 1960 and 1974 that consciously addressed Hiroshige's earlier treatment of the same route. Shōno, the forty-fifth station, is associated in the print tradition with Hiroshige's image of travelers caught in a sudden downpour on a sloping road. Sekino's version reframes the station for the twentieth century, often paring the composition down to architectural geometry, telephone wires, or quiet roadside detail rather than narrative incident. Within the series, Sekino used the full sōsaku-hanga vocabulary — visible cherry-grain texture, broad flat color, controlled bokashi — to articulate his distance from the more theatrical staging of late-Edo prints. The Tōkaidō series stands as a sustained project of his mature career and is the principal vehicle through which he conducted his dialogue with Hiroshige's canonical landscape sequence.