Nanbanesque behaviour

The title indicates the print's subject lies within Kawakami's central preoccupation: the visual culture of the Nanban trade era and its modern echoes. The print likely shows a Western or Westernized figure engaged in some characteristic action—drinking, smoking, embracing, holding a strange object—rendered with the costume conventions Kawakami took from Edo-period Nanban screens (puffed pantaloons, broad hats, ruffs) but applied to ambiguous modern or imagined situations. The composition is flat and frontal, the carving deliberately rough, and the color palette restricted in the manner of his other Nanban prints. Self-carved and self-printed on washi, the impression carries the small irregularities that hand-baren work produces. The numbered slug indicates this is the fourth variant in a series Kawakami developed around the Nanbanesque idea—a reflection of his characteristic working method, in which a single motif was reworked across multiple plates and impressions over months or years rather than completed in a single definitive version.