Snowy dawn at Nigetsudo (of Todaiji Temple)

Nigetsu-do, the February Hall of Todaiji in Nara, is the wooden hillside chapel best known for the Omizutori fire-and-water ritual held there each March. Kotozuka's print depicts the hall under fresh snow at first light, a moment when the steep cypress-bark roof and the suspended bronze lanterns of the veranda would still be banded with white. The composition almost certainly relies on a stilled palette of pale grey-blue, ink black, and unprinted [washi](/glossary/washi) reading as snow, with [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) gradations carrying the cold sky from horizon to upper sheet. Architectural lines are held tight by the carver's keyblock, while the snow on the eaves and the ground is built from successive overprintings rather than incised detail. Although Nara lay just outside Kotozuka's usual Kyoto subject range, Todaiji's halls fit naturally within his lifelong concentration on the religious architecture of the old capitals, and the print belongs to the same [shin-hanga](/glossary/shin-hanga) atmospheric idiom -- weather, hour, and place treated as a single pictorial subject -- that he absorbed from Hasui and Yoshida.