Rabbit in dish

An unusual still-life subject within Hiratsuka's predominantly architectural and devotional output, this print depicts a rabbit-form ceramic dish — a folk-art object of the type produced in Japanese kilns as auspicious tableware, the hare being a lunar and longevity emblem. Hiratsuka treats the dish as sculpture, isolating the form against the white of the washi and modeling its volume through the bold gouge work for which his sosaku-hanga prints are known. The composition would emphasize the silhouette of the crouched animal, the rim of the dish, and the texture of the glaze, all translated into the binary language of black ink and unprinted paper. Works of this kind sit alongside his vegetable and tool studies as quieter counterpoints to the temple subjects, and they reflect the mingei-adjacent sensibility that pervaded the sosaku-hanga circle in the postwar decades, where everyday objects were treated with the same compositional seriousness as monuments.