Moon at Enoshima Beach — 月夜の江の嶋

Moon at Enoshima Beach is a moonlit coastal landscape by Ishiwata Koitsu, a shin-hanga artist whose late-career landscapes concentrate on evening light, weather, and the meeting of land and sea along the Japanese coast. Enoshima, the small tidal island off the Shonan coast south of Tokyo, has been a destination for pilgrims, poets, and printmakers since the Edo period, and Koitsu approaches it through the lens of shin-hanga's emphasis on mood over narrative. In this composition the rocky silhouette of Enoshima rises from the bay while a full moon hangs over the dark water, its reflection drawn in carefully spaced bands of light across the surface of the sea. The horizon is low, the sky is broad, and the foreground beach is rendered in cool tonal washes that capture wet sand at low tide. The print belongs to the shin-hanga (new prints) movement, which revived the collaborative model of the traditional ukiyo-e workshop, pairing a designing artist with specialist carvers and printers to produce hand-printed landscapes for collectors in Japan and overseas. Ishiwata Koitsu's prints in this period were published by Doi Hangaten publisher in Tokyo, a key shin-hanga publisher that commissioned series of landscapes from him and managed their carving, printing, and distribution. The Doi Hangaten publisher's craftsmen achieved the deep bokashi gradations of night sky and reflected moonlight that define the print. The work is documented at ukiyo-e.org under its Japanese title and the Toko-no series number recorded by the aggregator. The image and bibliographic record are preserved at ukiyo-e.org, which functions as a public reference archive for shin-hanga prints by Ishiwata Koitsu and his contemporaries.