A branch of lychees

This mokuhanga shows a single branch of lychees, the round fruit and lobed leaves isolated against a quiet ground in the [kacho-e](/glossary/kacho-e) tradition of bird-and-flower pictures. Onchi's treatment, however, departs sharply from the decorative elegance of Hokusai's or Koson's nature studies: the forms are flattened into broad color shapes, the contour reduced or omitted entirely, and the woodgrain often allowed to register as visible texture across leaf and fruit. The print likely uses a restricted palette — muted reds or pinks for the lychees against subdued greens — with [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) gradations softening the transitions. Such still-life subjects appear intermittently across Onchi's output as counterweights to his abstract Lyrique and Poem series, demonstrating that the [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga) insistence on artist-as-sole-creator extended equally to traditional motifs. Carved and printed entirely by Onchi himself, the work translates a subject native to Edo-period printmaking into the vocabulary of twentieth-century modernism.