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](/glossary/sumi) against unprinted [washi](/glossary/washi), the figure defined as much by silhouette as by interior detail. Agricultural subjects had been part of the [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/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.