The Furukawa River Embankment at Dusk (Kure yuku Furukawa-zutsumi)

The Furukawa runs through the Shibuya area of Tokyo before joining the Meguro River, its embankments lined with cherry trees and willows that made them popular promenades in spring and summer. Hasui's title—Kure yuku Furukawa-zutsumi, roughly 'the Furukawa embankment at day's end'—specifies a dusk setting, indicating one of the atmospheric twilight compositions for which he was particularly celebrated. At dusk, his palette shifts toward deeper blues and purples in the sky, with warm orange and pink at the horizon, figures on the embankment rendered as dark silhouettes against the luminous fading light reflected in the water below. The Watanabe workshop's printers achieved these twilight effects through careful layering of transparent pigments and precisely controlled bokashi gradations. The riverbank subject—combining water, sky, and human presence at a transitional moment of day—exemplifies the core vocabulary of Hasui's landscape practice across his most accomplished series work.