Cat and fireworks

A summer-festival subject combining Inagaki's signature feline with hanabi imagery. The cat is likely placed in the foreground as a black silhouette — perhaps seated, watching upward — while the night sky behind it carries the bright radial bursts of fireworks. This is a rare instance in Inagaki's work of polychrome celebration: where most of his cat prints restrict themselves to black, one ground tone, and a single accent, fireworks invite a more colorful palette of reds, yellows, and whites against deep blue or near-black. The composition would play the cat's compact stillness against the fireworks' explosive geometry, two visual registers held in deliberate tension on the same sheet. The bursts themselves are a natural fit for woodblock technique — concentric or radial designs cut directly into the block, pulled cleanly with the baren. The print sits in the strand of his feline imagery that places the cat in seasonal or domestic settings rather than isolated against a plain ground.