Snow Is coming 2

A late-autumn or early-winter scene, second state of a Snow Is Coming subject. The title suggests anticipation rather than arrival — bare branches, a heavy sky, fields stripped after harvest, with snow not yet on the ground. Tanaka renders this transitional weather through a denser ink film across the upper plate to suggest a low, weighted sky, and through sparser, more skeletal line in the foreground vegetation. A minka, if present, would sit with its thatched roof darkened by damp, smoke threading from the kitchen vent into still air. The numbered '2' indicates a companion to a related plate, consistent with his habit of working subjects in pairs or short series. The image fits the Snow Scenes strand of his work, where winter conditions stripped the rural landscape down to essential forms — roofline, trunk, stone wall — well-suited to the linear discipline of etching and to his sustained interest in the unbusy season.