A man and a cicada

A man and a cicada—the giant insect whose summer shrieking fills Japanese mountain forests until the first autumn cool silences them—is a small, intimate subject in Azechi's hand. The cicada, beloved in Japanese poetry for its brief, intense existence and loud proclamation of summer, appears here as a companion to a human figure, the contrast in scale between the small insect and its human observer making the creature's voice seem all the more disproportionately powerful. Azechi treats the humble encounter with the same bold simplification he brought to his summit scenes.