Branch With leaves

A study of foliage isolated against the paper ground, working in the kacho-e (bird-and-flower) tradition but stripped of its decorative Edo-period vocabulary. Sasajima's natural subjects, when he turned to them, were treated with the same blunt directness as his temple beams — leaves and stems rendered as flat, carved silhouettes rather than modeled forms. The print relies on the contrast between the dense black of the inked branch and the unprinted washi for its compositional structure, with bokashi gradation used sparingly if at all. As a sosaku-hanga artist, Sasajima rejected the division of labor that produced commercial nishiki-e in earlier centuries; the carving knife marks remaining on the printed surface are part of the work's intended texture. The piece sits at the periphery of his output, which was overwhelmingly devoted to architectural and Buddhist subjects, and reflects the broader sosaku-hanga interest in everyday motifs handled with formal seriousness.