Summer landscape

Kawakami treats summer landscape with the same flat, graphic sensibility he brought to his Nanban subjects, refusing the atmospheric haze and gradient [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) that [shin-hanga](/glossary/shin-hanga) printmakers used to evoke seasonal mood. The composition relies on stacked color planes—a green foreground, a flat sky, perhaps a structure or tree as a vertical accent—rather than aerial perspective or light effects. The carving leaves visible knife marks, and the printing, done by the artist himself on [washi](/glossary/washi), accepts the slight inking and registration drift that hand-[baren](/glossary/baren) work produces. Within the [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga) movement, where landscape was often the dominant genre, Kawakami's contribution was to strip the form of its picturesque conventions and treat it as a formal arrangement of shapes and colors closer to folk-art signboards than to Hiroshige or Kawase Hasui. The print sits adjacent to his foreigner pictures as evidence that his idiom was a single consistent visual language applied across whatever subject matter came to hand.