Two small egg-shaped figures, standing no taller than a teacup, each carrying its own season on its body. One is wrapped in soft olive waves that curl toward a pair of birds caught mid-flight. The other is scattered with dozens of pale, snow-like ovals that spill straight onto the kimono without a break. Side by side they hold a kind of quiet balance, warm summer green against honey-brown winter, two halves of the same idea standing a hand's width apart.

These two belong to Okamoto Usaburō's "Shiki no Uta," or Poem of the Four Seasons, a design created for his workshop at the foot of Mount Haruna in Gunma Prefecture. Usaburō spent his career developing carving and burning techniques that let wood carry more expression than kokeshi traditionally allowed, work that eventually reached the collection of Emperor Shōwa.

This pair represents summer and winter from his four-part seasonal design, and the softer linework and gentle surface patina on both place them earlier in the workshop's long production history, well before the cleaner, more uniform look of the pieces made today.