Sample intaglio sample image (animals/half-beast iconography)

Here Yanagisawa returns to the half-beast — a recurring subject in her prints, in which animal and human anatomies fuse without resolving into any single mythological identity. The composition is built primarily through mezzotint, the rocker-prepared plate burnished selectively to draw light out of a uniformly dark ground; etched line is reserved for accents around eyes, joints, and fur edges. The result is a figure that reads as sculptural mass rather than outlined silhouette, sitting in an indefinite, tonally modulated space. On [gampi](/glossary/gampi), the dark mezzotint passages hold their density while the hand-dyed colour settles into the paper's surface as faint atmosphere rather than discrete shapes. The iconography draws on a long East Asian tradition of zoomorphic guardians and shapeshifters, but Yanagisawa avoids specific mythological labels, leaving the creature deliberately unfixed. This belongs to the late phase of her output, in which the intaglio technique inherited from the Komai school is turned toward a more meditative, emblematic subject matter than the figurative or landscape concerns of her teachers and Geidai contemporaries.