Lake Kizaki, Shinshu

Lake Kizaki is the largest of the three Nishina lakes in northern Nagano (the old province of Shinshu), set among the foothills of the Northern Alps. Hiratsuka's print would translate this alpine lake into his characteristic monochrome vocabulary: still water as untouched white paper, surrounding mountains and forests carved as massed black shapes, with the shoreline forming the principal compositional armature. Shinshu's mountain landscapes were a recurring subject across twentieth-century Japanese prints, but where shin-hanga artists rendered them with seasonal color and atmospheric bokashi, Hiratsuka's sosaku-hanga approach reduces the same scenery to structural contour and mark. The carved gouge lines themselves likely serve as texture for foliage, water ripples, or distant ridges. This print belongs to the substantial body of regional landscape work Hiratsuka produced through his decades of travel within Japan, in which he repeatedly tested how much atmospheric specificity could survive in pure black-and-white relief carving — a question central to the technical project of the sosaku-hanga movement.