Snow country

Snow country, a yukigeshiki composition, presents a landscape buried under thick winter snow, the kind of subject that drew Kasamatsu repeatedly through his seven-decade career. The title invokes the literary register of Yasunari Kawabata's 1937 novel Yukiguni and the broader cultural identification of the Japan Sea coast and northern interior with deep snowfall. Snow subjects test a print workshop more than nearly any other: the printer must balance the reserved white of the washi against the few keyblock outlines, the soft tonal washes that suggest a snow-laden sky, and the embossed passages that lift drift surfaces above the flat sheet. Kasamatsu produced a number of snow prints across his career, and they are among the works most associated with him alongside his rain and night scenes. The composition typically isolates a single motif—a roofed gate, a pine, a hut—against the surrounding white, with bokashi gradations carrying the eye into a flattened, low-contrast distance that mutes the usual perspectival cues of a landscape print.