Evening moon at Nakanoshima

Nakanoshima, a small island in the Toyohira River in Sapporo, Hokkaido, is depicted here in one of Hasui's Hokkaido landscape series. The island park, densely planted with trees, sits low against the river, and Hasui's composition likely exploits the reflective surface of the water to double the moonlight across the picture plane. This impression uses the title without geographic specification, distinguishing it cataloguewise from the more fully titled Nakanoshima Park variants. The nocturnal palette typical of Hasui's moon prints—deep indigo and black in the tree masses, graded silver-grey in the sky, broken white on water surfaces—would be achieved through multiple woodblock passes with careful registration. The subject is consistent with his broader documentation of Hokkaido landscapes during the 1930s.