Adam And Eve

A variant or second state of the Adam and Eve subject, the existence of two compositions suggests Tokuriki returned to the theme with different framing or palette—a practice common among sosaku-hanga artists who treated repeated subjects as opportunities for formal exploration rather than commercial reissue. Differences between the two might involve orientation (vertical versus horizontal), the handling of the tree and serpent, or the figures' posture and proportion. Tokuriki often self-carved and self-printed his sosaku-hanga work, distinguishing it from the larger-edition shin-hanga prints he produced through publishers like Uchida. The sosaku-hanga ethos of jiga-jikoku-jizuri—self-drawn, self-carved, self-printed—permitted such iterative variations, making each print a record of the artist's shifting interpretation rather than a fixed published image. The Western biblical subject signals Tokuriki's engagement with the international currents that reshaped Japanese printmaking in the postwar decades.