Taki River and Otonashi River at Kongôji Temple

The print depicts the meeting of the Taki and Otonashi rivers near the Kongoji temple grounds. Compositions of this kind typically use an elevated vantage to set the architecture against the receding ribbons of water, with bokashi describing the depth of the surface and the shaded ravine walls. The doubled river subject permits Koizumi to display the woodblock's capacity for water rendering — small directional cuts in the keyblock for the current, layered transparent passes for the shifting tone of the stream. Temple-and-river compositions belong to the meisho-e and shin-hanga landscape vocabulary, and their appearance in Koizumi's output reflects his hybrid position: the topographic, place-named subjects of shin-hanga combined with the sosaku-hanga discipline of self-carving and self-printing. He designed, carved, and printed every block himself, the print emerging entirely from his hand without the workshop division of Edo-period production.