Adam and Eve

The subject is unusual within Tokuriki's catalogue, which is otherwise dominated by Kyoto landmarks, Japanese landscapes, and Mount Fuji views. An Adam and Eve print places him in the sosaku-hanga current, where artists treated the woodblock as a medium for individual expression rather than reproduction of established Edo-period subjects. The composition would pair two nude figures with an apple tree and serpent, treated through Tokuriki's flat color blocks and crisp keyline drawing. Sosaku-hanga artists from the 1930s onward often engaged Western imagery—biblical scenes, modernist figuration, abstraction—as part of a self-conscious break from ukiyo-e conventions. For Tokuriki, who co-founded the print study group Han no Kai with Hiratsuka Un'ichi and Maekawa Sempan in 1936, such a subject sits within his lifelong negotiation between inherited Kyoto craft and twentieth-century artistic individualism, and demonstrates the breadth his seven-decade career covered beyond his familiar landscape repertoire.