Urihime

Urihime, the Melon Princess of Japanese folklore, is a girl born from a split melon and raised by an old couple, later abducted or impersonated by a trickster — most often the demon Amanojaku, though regional variants substitute a monkey, which the slug suggests is the version Kawakami chose here. The print likely shows the princess at her loom or confronting her tormentor, rendered in Kawakami's characteristic flat planes of unmodulated color and heavy black outlines drawn from the visual vocabulary of folk toys, votive ema plaques, and Edo-period playing cards. Like much of his sosaku-hanga output, the composition rejects the atmospheric bokashi gradations and refined registration of nishiki-e in favor of a deliberately rough-hewn, hand-cut quality that foregrounds the gouge of the blade and the weave of the washi. Folktale subjects ran through Kawakami's work alongside his nanban scenes of foreign sailors and Yokohama harbors, and both share the same playful provincialism — a self-taught looseness that set him apart from Koshiro Onchi's lyrical abstraction and from the more refined craftsmen working within the creative-print movement.