The summit

A mountain peak rendered in Hiratsuka's characteristic woodcut idiom, "The summit" belongs to his extensive engagement with Japanese landscape — a tradition that runs from Hokusai's Fugaku Sanjurokkei through the shin-hanga of Kawase Hasui and into the sosaku-hanga generation. Hiratsuka's mountain prints typically deploy bold black masses against unprinted washi, the negative space carrying as much pictorial weight as the inked areas. The carving knife rather than the brush dictates the contour of each ridge, and the resulting silhouette tends toward angular simplification rather than the gradient atmospherics of his shin-hanga contemporaries. Printed by hand with a baren, such compositions emphasize the physical character of the medium: visible block grain, the slight unevenness of pressure, and a deliberate asymmetry of composition. The choice of summit as subject — a place reached, not merely seen — connects the work to the long Japanese tradition of mountain veneration and to the modernist taste for elemental motifs. It exemplifies the artist's lifelong commitment to monochrome as a fully expressive idiom.