Boy With cat

A figurative composition pairing a child with a cat, an unusual genre subject in Sasajima's largely architectural and devotional output. The treatment carries his typical mokuhanga vocabulary: heavy black masses defining hair, clothing, and the cat's form through bold negative-space carving, with the visible chisel-strokes integrated into the image rather than smoothed away. Sasajima trained as a painter before turning to woodblock under Onchi Koshiro in the late 1930s, and the figurative work in his oeuvre retains a painter's attention to gesture and weight. The print belongs to the sosaku-hanga tradition of self-designed, self-carved, and self-printed work, in which the artist's hand is registered at every stage. The intimate scale of the subject — a child holding a cat — reads as a departure from the monumentality of his Todai-ji and Horyu-ji studies, though executed in the same direct manner with the same restraint of palette.