Ikada Nagashi (Rafting)

Ikada Nagashi (筏流し, 'Rafting') is a 1959 painting by Kawabata Ryūshi held by the Ryūshi Memorial Museum in Ōta, Tokyo. The composition, an extended horizontal panorama, depicts a log raft being floated down a river — a subject drawn from the traditional Japanese forestry industry, in which timber from the mountain forests of central Honshū was lashed into rafts and guided downstream to coastal markets by raftsmen using long poles. The motif has a long history in Japanese painting and printmaking, appearing in Edo-period [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e) landscapes (Hiroshige's late landscapes especially) and in Meiji watercolor and oil practice. Ryūshi takes the subject and treats it in the panoramic format that he had developed for his Seiryūsha exhibition pieces — an extreme horizontal composition designed to be read as a single sweeping image across a large gallery wall, rather than as a sequence of pictorial events read serially as in a handscroll. Painted in the year he received the Order of Culture (Bunka Kunshō), Ikada Nagashi is a late work that returns to traditional Japanese subject matter with the formal ambition he had brought to nihonga across forty years.