Street food stall

The yatai, or mobile food stall, was a fixture of Edo and Meiji urban life and remained central to twentieth-century street culture. A genre print on this subject would register the small canopy lit from within by a paper lantern, the cook tending pots beneath it, and one or two patrons hunched over their bowls. Compositionally such prints often crop tightly to emphasize the stall's intimate scale, with the surrounding street rendered through deep flat tones to throw the lit interior into relief. The subject sits within Oda's wider interest in modern urban life — the same milieu Toulouse-Lautrec had treated in Parisian cafe scenes, and Bonnard in Nabis-period genre work — translated into a specifically Japanese register through the mokuhanga medium and the yatai vocabulary. The print belongs to the [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga) current that took ordinary urban life as legitimate subject matter.