Affection

Saito's macaque (saru) prints form a distinctive thread within his catalog, depicting Japanese mountain monkeys with the same compositional rigor he brought to landscape and architectural subjects. This print likely shows a pair of macaques in close physical contact—grooming or embracing—rendered in his flattened, planar style. Saito typically simplified the animals into bold silhouettes against backgrounds where the natural wood grain of the cherry-wood block remains visible across the larger color areas, the texture of the timber serving as part of the image rather than being suppressed beneath ink. The approach exemplifies sosaku-hanga practice, in which the artist designed, carved, and printed each block himself rather than dividing the work among specialists as ukiyo-e production had. His animal subjects, like his Aizu winter scenes, balance modernist abstraction with affectionate observation, reducing the macaque's posture and fur to essential graphic elements while preserving the warmth of the original encounter.