Mountain Stream, Shôwa period, dated 1956

Dated 1956, this work represents an early Shōwa-period excursion into landscape outside Sasajima's dominant architectural subject matter. A mountain stream presents the technical challenge of rendering moving water — translucent, reflective, and directional — through the inherently flat medium of woodblock. Sasajima likely addressed this through selective reduction: areas of bare washi paper standing in for the water's brightest passages, with carved marks suggesting current direction and turbulence rather than describing water in naturalistic detail. The rocky banks or surrounding forest, if included, would provide a dark register against which the stream's lighter passages read. The print's date places it in the period when Sasajima was consolidating his mature sosaku-hanga vocabulary under the influence of Onchi Kōshirō, who had died the previous year (1955). The composition may carry some of Onchi's lyrical abstraction — form simplified to essential rhythms without full departure from representation.