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](/glossary/sosaku-hanga) (creative-print) principle, and in works of this kind the grain of the [washi](/glossary/washi) and the slight tonal variation left by the [baren](/glossary/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.