Rain at Maekawa in Sagami Province (Soshu Maekawa no ame), from the series "Selection of Views of the Tokaido (Tokaido fukei senshu)"

Rain at Maekawa in Sagami Province (Soshu Maekawa no ame), from Kawase Hasui's Selection of Views of the Tokaido (Tokaido fukei senshū) of 1932, depicts a heavy rain falling over the village of Maekawa, a stretch of the historical Tokaidō highway in former Sagami Province. The print belongs to one of Hasui's most admired bodies of work, in which he revisited the highway tradition long associated with Hiroshige's nineteenth-century Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaidō. Where Hiroshige's stations had focused on travelers, post-stations, and changing seasons along the highway, Hasui's series returned to the same regions in a quieter, more atmospheric idiom characteristic of the [shin-hanga](/glossary/shin-hanga) movement. The composition uses the standard pictorial convention of slanting parallel lines to register rain, but the printers in publisher Watanabe Shozaburo's Tokyo workshop combined these incised lines with carefully graded [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) tones in the sky and ground to give the scene its sodden weight. Hasui's rain scenes have been among the most consistently collected of his works since the 1930s, valued for their continuity with earlier [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e) weather subjects and for the technical demands they made on Watanabe's carvers and printers. The Art Institute of Chicago, which preserves this impression, situates Rain at Maekawa within Hasui's mature engagement with the Tokaidō motif, in which the modern viewer is invited to read the highway not as a route of pre-modern travel but as a sequence of remembered places transformed by weather and time, a sensibility central to shin-hanga's project of renewing the woodblock landscape tradition.