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](/glossary/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.