Coffee pot

This print depicts a coffee pot, an unmistakably modern subject that situates Inagaki within the sosaku-hanga movement's embrace of everyday domestic objects as legitimate fine-art material. Western-style coffee culture had become firmly established in early twentieth-century Tokyo, and the kissaten (coffee shop) was a familiar element of urban life by the time Inagaki was working. The composition likely treats the pot as a still-life isolate — a single graphic object on a flat ground, with its silhouette, spout, and handle reduced to a clean profile and its body articulated by a few discrete color planes. The approach owes as much to European modernist still life and poster design as to traditional Japanese printmaking, an intersection that defined the creative-print movement's early decades. Where commercial nishiki-e of the Edo period had codified subject categories like bijin-ga and meisho-e, sosaku-hanga artists deliberately broke from those genres. Inagaki's coffee pot, like his cats, demonstrates how a humble subject, treated with strict economy of line and color, could carry the full graphic weight of a finished print.