Cat at Sunset

In this composition Inagaki sets a cat silhouette against a graduated color field evoking late-day light, almost certainly achieved with [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) — the hand-wiped tonal gradient pulled across the block before printing. The technique, inherited from Edo-period landscape printers like Hiroshige, here serves a modernist end: the sky becomes a single atmospheric plane against which the black cat reads as pure shape. Inagaki tended to crop such scenes tightly, eliminating ground line and horizon so that the animal floats in colored space. The eyes — usually the brightest accents in his cat prints — would catch the warm tonality of the surrounding field, fixing the viewer's attention. This print belongs to the cycle of cat compositions Inagaki refined from the 1930s through the 1960s, in which a single feline form is repeatedly tested against different chromatic and seasonal conditions. The work demonstrates how the [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga) generation absorbed the bokashi tradition while stripping it of its narrative and topographical functions.