Buddhas Hand and navel orange

A still life pairing a bushukan (Buddha's hand citron, fingered citrus prized in Japan as a New Year offering and for its fragrance) with a navel orange, a subject that sits outside the [kacho-e](/glossary/kacho-e) tradition of birds and flowers and closer to the shaseiga observational still lifes that nihonga-trained [shin-hanga](/glossary/shin-hanga) artists occasionally produced. The composition likely isolates the two fruits against a plain or lightly toned ground, exploiting the contrast between the pale, knuckled projections of the bushukan and the rounded, deeper-hued orange to demonstrate the carver's ability to register subtle modeling through [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) and the printer's command of overlapping color blocks on washi. Within Yamamura's oeuvre, dominated by [yakusha-e](/glossary/yakusha-e) and [bijin-ga](/glossary/bijin-ga), such still lifes are uncommon and reflect his nihonga grounding and his interest in extending mokuhanga technique beyond figural subjects, an experimental tendency shared with contemporaries working under Watanabe and other shin-hanga publishers in the interwar decades.