Black Cat at Night

This narrow [tanzaku](/glossary/tanzaku) print, held by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (accession 2011.583, gift of Stephen Hamilton), is among the most arresting designs Shōda Kōhō produced for the publisher Hasegawa-Nishinomiya. The composition is reductive almost to the point of abstraction: a single black cat with luminous yellow eyes sits beneath a dark branch of broad leaves, its body fading into the surrounding night and reduced almost entirely to the pair of glowing eyes that anchor the image. The chosen palette — saturated black, faint indigo-grey, and a sharp accent of cadmium yellow — is exactly the kind of high-contrast nocturnal effect for which the Hasegawa workshop became known. The print measures 33.7 by 7.9 cm, the standard [hashira-e](/glossary/hashira-e) (pillar print) dimension, and dates to the 1920s. It belongs to the series Japanese Scenes on Tanzaku that Shōda produced jointly with Yoshimoto Gessō, in which each artist contributed designs for sets of twelve narrow vertical prints. The verso carries the publisher's English Made in Japan stamp and Nishinomiya's copyright seal. The MFAH print, like other versions documented at the Japanese Art Open Database, exemplifies Shōda's gift for compressing atmosphere — here a particular feline stillness — into the most restrictive of formats.