Nanbanesque behaviour

A second variation on Kawakami's nanban-behavior theme, likely a separate composition rather than a re-strike, depicting Westerners engaged in some manner — drinking, smoking, courting, music-making — that the artist isolates as foreign social ritual. Kawakami returned repeatedly to this material, building a serial inventory of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European types that functions less as historical illustration than as a personal alphabet. The carving emphasizes silhouette over modeling: a wide-brimmed hat, a ruff, a long pipe, a doublet are each cut as a distinct shape and printed in a single flat color, with the keyblock outline holding the design together in the manner of a stencil. The pairing of two nanban-behavior prints under the same title is consistent with Kawakami's habit of working in small thematic suites and ehon sequences rather than isolated images. Within sosaku-hanga, this body of work occupies a niche of its own — neither landscape nor abstraction, but a folk-graphic ethnography of cultural contact.