Drying Yuzen textiles at the Katsura river

The print records a working scene specific to Kyoto: long bolts of yuzen-dyed silk stretched out over the Katsura river to be rinsed and dried, a practice carried out by the city's kimono dyers well into the twentieth century. Compositionally, this kind of subject lends itself to a strong horizontal band of river crossed by the colored lengths of cloth, with the bolts themselves giving the printer an unusual opportunity for saturated areas of pattern and pigment within an otherwise restrained landscape palette. Bokashi gradations would carry the water surface and the sky, while the keyblock would define the wooden poles, the figures of the workers, and the riverbank vegetation. For Kotozuka, who built his career on Kyoto subjects, the yuzen-nagashi was as much a meisho motif as any temple or garden -- a piece of the city's craft economy treated alongside its monuments. The print sits within the broader twentieth-century shin-hanga interest in surviving traditional industries observed at a particular hour and season.