Nagasaki

This print depicts the port city on Kyushu's western coast, a subject Hiratsuka returned to across his career. The city's distinctive topography—steep hills tumbling toward the harbor, dotted with both Buddhist temples and the Christian churches that mark its history as Japan's longest-standing point of contact with Europe—lent itself to the bold black-and-white compositions Hiratsuka favored. Rooftops, ship masts, and stone steps register through carved planes of stark white against deep ink black, with the negative space of the [washi](/glossary/washi) paper carrying as much compositional weight as the printed areas. The print exemplifies sōsaku-hanga's commitment to the artist's hand at every stage: Hiratsuka designed, carved, and printed the block himself. Townscapes of this kind sit alongside his temple studies as documentation of place, filtered through the angular, planar carving style he developed across a career producing more than three thousand prints. The choice of monochrome rather than [nishiki-e](/glossary/nishiki-e) polychromy was deliberate, asserting the woodblock's sculptural rather than decorative possibilities.