Shinkawa at Night (Yoru no Shinkawa), from the series Twelve Scenes of Tokyo (Tôkyô jûnidai)

"Yoru no Shinkawa" (Shinkawa at Night) from the series Twelve Scenes of Tokyo presents the canal district as a study in nocturnal reflection. Shinkawa, once lined with wholesale warehouses (kura) serving the Edo and Tokyo merchant economy, offered Hasui a scene that was simultaneously modern and architecturally traditional. In this series print, the canal surface acts as a mirror for dim lamps and the dark outlines of storehouses, while small boats may be moored along the embankment. The series format — producing twelve paired landscape prints — encouraged compositional consistency, and Hasui typically balanced dark foreground masses against a more luminous middle distance to create spatial recession in limited-color nighttime compositions.