Rain No

The title indicates a numbered entry in a Rain series, a serial format Ono and his sosaku-hanga peers used to work through a single motif across multiple compositions. Rain in mokuhanga has a long technical history: Hiroshige's diagonal incised lines established one solution, and twentieth-century creative printmakers experimented with carved hatching, layered bokashi, and the deliberate scoring of the block to produce streaks across an inked field. Ono's approach in such a print would likely favor strong tonal contrast — a darkened ground against which rain reads as carved white lines, or the reverse — consistent with the graphic directness of his 1930s urban work. Serial treatment of a weather subject also reflects the sosaku-hanga commitment to the print as an arena for sustained personal investigation rather than a one-off illustration. The work belongs to the strand of Ono's output in which atmospheric and tonal concerns sit alongside the more overtly social subjects for which he is better known.