Reaper

The print depicts a figure cutting grain or grass with a sickle (kama), one of the familiar images of rural labor in early- and mid-twentieth-century Japanese art. Hiratsuka's bold black-and-white woodcut technique reduces the worker's bent posture, the swing of the blade, and the standing crop to broad planes of carved sumi against unprinted washi, the figure defined as much by silhouette as by interior detail. Agricultural subjects had been part of the sosaku-hanga vocabulary since the movement's beginnings — Yamamoto Kanae's 1904 print Fisherman, widely credited as its founding work, took a laboring figure as its subject — and Hiratsuka returned to such themes throughout his career. Designed, cut, and pulled entirely by the artist according to the jiga-jikoku-jizuri principle, the print exemplifies the creative-print insistence that the artist's hand should remain visible at every stage of production, from initial drawing through final impression.