Evening Shower on Imai Bridge

This print depicting Imai Bridge under an evening shower is related to, or an alternate printing of, the 1932 yūdachi composition. Imai Bridge crosses a waterway in the Kanda or Sumida river network of eastern Tokyo, a district whose waterfront scenes Hasui returned to throughout his career. The bridge subject allowed Hasui to position rain against the open sky above the water surface, with reflections on the river below doubling the atmospheric effect. Pedestrians caught in the shower provide scale and imply narrative without dominating the composition. Hasui's rain-on-bridge imagery participates in a long lineage of ukiyo-e bridge scenes — Hiroshige's Ōhashi in rain being the canonical precedent — while replacing Edo woodblock flatness with the graduated tonal depth of shin-hanga technique.