Evening Snow at Sanjūgen Canal (Sanjūgenbori no bosetsu), from the unfinished series Twelve Months of Tokyo (Tōkyō jūnikagetsu)

Evening Snow at Sanjugen Canal (Sanjugenbori no bosetsu) was designed by Kawase Hasui in 1920 for the unfinished series Twelve Months of Tokyo (Tokyo junikagetsu) and is held by the Harvard Art Museums. The woodblock print depicts the Sanjugenbori canal in Tokyo on a snowy evening, with low warehouses lining the water and a few small boats moored beneath the falling snow. Kawase Hasui composes the scene with a strong horizontal emphasis, allowing the canal to recede into a darkening distance while the snow gathers on roofs and along the embankment. The Twelve Months of Tokyo series was conceived as a cycle that would survey the capital across the seasons, but the project was disrupted by the 1923 Great Kanto earthquake, which destroyed the blocks for many of Kawase Hasui's early prints and brought the series to an early close. The print was published by Watanabe Shozaburo, whose Tokyo workshop produced the shin-hanga, or new prints, movement through the collaboration of designer, carvers, and printers. The Sanjugenbori canal, located in the warehouse districts close to the Sumida River, was a working part of the early-twentieth-century city, and Kawase Hasui's choice to depict it under an evening snowfall transforms the everyday infrastructure of trade into a poetic scene. The print's snowy mood, restrained palette, and careful printing exemplify the early shin-hanga style that Kawase Hasui and Watanabe Shozaburo were jointly developing in the years immediately before the earthquake, and it remains a key surviving witness to that ambitious but interrupted Tokyo cycle.