Cat on cushion

A domestic cat shown settled on a cushion, the title pointing to one of Inagaki's recurring interior subjects. Within his cat series, Inagaki typically reduced the feline form to a flat black silhouette laid against a single ground tone, the body simplified to overlapping curves and the eyes opened as luminous discs or narrowed to slits. Pairing the rounded cat with the geometry of a cushion gives the composition two contrasting masses without recourse to perspectival space, a strategy borrowed from modernist poster design and adapted to mokuhanga. Inagaki carved and printed his own blocks in line with sosaku-hanga (creative-print) principle, and in works of this kind the grain of the washi and the slight tonal variation left by the baren are part of the surface, not concealed beneath ink. Cushion and lap-cat scenes recur across his 1930s–1960s output and were among the works that established him as the movement's most identifiable painter of cats.