Farmers

A figural composition depicting working figures, treated in Inagaki's reductive idiom of black contour and flat color. Farmers and laborers were a recurrent sosaku-hanga subject, carrying associations both with mingei-influenced reverence for handwork and with the postwar reconstruction emphasis on rural life. Inagaki typically simplifies his human figures more aggressively than his cats: limbs become straight or gently curved bars, faces are reduced to a few cut lines, and clothing reads as a single planar shape. The print likely arranges two or more figures in a shallow space, their bodies overlapping to create the composition's primary rhythm. Tools — sickles, baskets, hoes — appear as schematic accents. The carving exhibits the directness Inagaki valued: visible knife tracks at the edges of forms rather than the polished outlines of the commercial Edo workshops. The work belongs to the social-subject strand of his output, less commercially visible than the cats but central to his identity within the Nihon Hanga Kyokai (Japan Print Association).