House with straw roof

House with straw roof is a single-subject portrait of a minka in the kayabuki tradition, the focus narrowed to one farmhouse and its immediate setting. Tanaka Ryohei devoted much of his career to these structures, drawing each thatched roof as a dense field of finely etched lines that follow the lay of the bundled miscanthus or rice straw. The plate would have been worked through multiple bites, with hard-ground line establishing the timber framing and aquatint reserved for the shaded undersides of eaves and the deep interior of an entrance. Such close studies allowed him to record the swelling curve of a ridge, the dark line of the muna-osae cap, and the texture of weathered wall plaster with documentary precision. The image fits within a long body of work in which Tanaka treated the individual farmhouse as a subject worthy of sustained attention, before encroaching modernization replaced these roofs with metal sheeting.