Katsuo Trail Series A - Bundle Presale

The Collection

The Katsuo Trail offers a distinctive way of thinking about landscape: rather than treating it as a line connecting scenic landmarks, it pays attention to the networks created between people and the structures they build with the many beings that inhabit them: animals, insects, rocks, fungi, lichens, and countless other forms of life. It asks what they might have to teach to those who walk alongside them. This is what Lucas BB refers to as trail learning.

This collection is conceived with trail learning in mind, pausing at places to look at them with patience and attention, until they reveal something to us, something that might have been there all along but we hadn’t noticed before.

Schedule and technical notes

The complete collection will consist of 11 views of the Katsuo Trail, each produced as a limited edition of 30 multicolored mokuhanga prints, A5 in size. Each print will be numbered.

The collection will be released in seasonal launches of three prints, beginning in October 2026.

To make the series as accessible as possible, we are offering a bundle of 3 prints at a special pre-sale price. Only 10 bundles of 3 prints each will be available.

Purchasing during the pre-sale secures your copy at the lowest possible price. Your print will be shipped once the first series becomes available in October 2026.

One important note: the images shown here are the original watercolor sketches that serve as the model for each woodblock print. They are not exact reproductions of the finished prints you will receive. We understand mokuhanga is a process of translation rather than reproduction, and each image evolves as it is carved, layered, and printed by hand.

Over the coming months, we'll share more of that journey—from the first watercolor, to the carved woodblocks, to the final prints.

THE BUNDLE

Print 1: Mirror at Hamatome Park

When biking along cars, traffic mirrors are very reassuring, giving you a sense of security at blind turns. As the trip went on, I came to think of them as these guardians that were helping me stay safe on the trail. One became the focal point of this print; I liked how its geometry met the diagonal of the mountain, with its messy overflowing texture.

The small boat in the background is a Yaizu Hacchoro (八丁櫓), a kind of boat that is no longer in use. The story goes that the Shogun allowed these special, very fast boats to be built only in Yaizu Bay so they could escort him on his hunting trips. With time, they became a symbol of Yaizu’s fisherfolk. The glass buoy I saw in the local museum and also displayed by a fisherman and local personality who gathers and sells objects at a little shack down the road. 

They are both anachronistic objects, and in that they help us look back and notice things — kind of like the mirror.

Print 2: Rainy day in Horai Bridge

This is the longest walkable wooden bridge in the world, isn’t that amazing? It’s so long that a lot of the images about it are about the perspective it creates, the way its long lines divide the landscape. Since those images already exist, I decided to focus instead on the play between the bridge and the mountain behind it, which was spotted with cherry blossoms. It was raining that day, a thin, steady rain.

Bridges in the rain a recurrent motif in Japanese prints, especially in Hiroshige’s work. Both rain and the unruliness of the mountain’s vegetation are pictorial problems that fascinate me: how do you translate the atmosphere and feel of rain into wood? How do you represent the texture of far-away forests, with their mix of blurriness and distinction?

As I –very slowly– made my way across it, I passed a woman with a red umbrella and decided to add her to the drawing, in a way paying homage to Hiroshige, and perhaps also to Yasujiro Ozu, who often anchored his compositions with a red object.

Print 3: Driftwood at Oigawa estuary

This is the end of the trail, an estuary where the Oi River meets the sea. When we got there, some driftwood sculptures were arranged on the shore. The landscape was otherwise quite flat and sparse, so I thought it would be nice to include them to make the composition more interesting. The next day, talking about Yaizu with Lucas BB, he mentioned that a famous radioactive giant lizard that shall not be named for proprietary reasons emerges in a film from Yaizu Bay, close to that location.

The earlier versions are a bit cartoony and heavy on the giant-radioactive-lizard reference. The final one tries to be a bit more subtle, with indirect but still fun references; the color scheme feels ominous and artificial, and the shapes are kind of harsh. There is also a little toy lost in the pebbles, if you can find it.