Evening Glow at Yanaka (Yanaka no yûbae), from the series Twelve Months in Tokyo (Tôkyô jûnikagetsu)

From the series Twelve Months in Tokyo (Tōkyō jūnikagetsu), this print documents the Yanaka neighborhood of northeastern Tokyo bathed in the warm light of an evening afterglow. Yanaka, located in Taitō ward, retained much of its Edo-period character well into the Shōwa era — old wooden townhouses, narrow lanes, and the large Yanaka Cemetery's densely planted grounds define its visual texture. Hasui likely positions the viewer along one of Yanaka's sloping lanes or beside the cemetery rows, where mature trees and traditional wooden structures catch the last horizontal light of the day. The yûbae (evening glow) effect — the warm suffusion of orange and rose light across rooftops, foliage, and sky in the minutes after sunset — required carefully sequenced block passes in warm pigments to achieve convincing atmospheric gradation. The series as a whole presents Tokyo's surviving traditional neighborhoods as living landscapes worth documenting through print, with Yanaka representing the city's most intact remnant of the shitamachi townscape that defined pre-modern Edo culture.