Lake Motosu

Lake Motosu (Motosu-ko) is the westernmost and deepest of the Fuji Five Lakes in Yamanashi Prefecture, and Hasui's print of this location situates it within his broader engagement with the Fuji landscape tradition inherited from Hokusai and Hiroshige. Unlike the more commercially prominent views from Kawaguchi-ko or Yamanaka-ko, Motosu offered Hasui relative compositional freedom and a less-depicted shoreline. The lake is known for exceptionally clear water due to underground filtration through volcanic rock, a quality Hasui may have rendered through deep, transparent blues in the water passages. Fuji appears in the distance across the lake in many compositions from this site, its conical profile reflected in the still surface. Hasui's print likely employs a low horizon line to maximize sky area, with bokashi gradations conveying time of day. The combination of the lake's foreground depth with the mountain's geometric silhouette creates the kind of spatial recession that characterizes his most accomplished landscape prints of the 1920s and 1930s.