Snowy scenery of Alaska

An unusual subject for a Japanese woodblock print, drawing on Kawakami's own biography — his father took him to Canada in childhood, and northern North America remained a personal reference point throughout his life. The composition reduces a snow-covered landscape to its essentials: dark conifers or wooden buildings silhouetted against pale snow, perhaps with mountains beyond. Where a Hiroshige snow scene built atmosphere through [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) gradation in the sky, Kawakami's snow scenes rely on the unprinted paper itself for the white, with sharp dark outlines describing only what cannot be left blank. As mokuhanga produced in the [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga) tradition, the print would have been carved, inked, and rubbed by Kawakami himself on [washi](/glossary/washi), with the texture of the paper participating in the image as a positive element rather than a passive ground. The Alaska subject sits within a broader strain of his work treating foreign places as remembered or imagined territory.