Daikokuten

Daikokuten, one of the Seven Lucky Gods (Shichifukujin) and a deity of wealth, agriculture, and the household, is conventionally depicted with a mallet, a sack of treasure, and rice bales. Saito's print likely shows a temple sculpture of the figure rather than the deity in narrative form—his religious subjects tend to derive from observed statuary treated as architectural-scale forms rather than as devotional icons. The figure would be reduced to broad planes of dark and mid-tone color, the mallet and sack reading as geometric shapes rather than illustrative detail, with the wood grain of the cherry block visible across the surface. Such religious-iconographic subjects place Saito within a long Japanese tradition of depicting Buddhist and Shinto figures in print form, while his treatment translates the subject through the formal vocabulary of sosaku-hanga, where carved-and-printed surface texture and flat planar composition replace the line-and-color conventions of earlier devotional imagery.