Night Of Shinjuku

Night Of Shinjuku turns Maekawa's attention to the Tokyo neighborhood that became, by the 1920s and 1930s, a center of cafés, theaters, and electric signage. Sosaku-hanga artists were drawn to such districts for the way artificial light recoded familiar streets, and the print form allowed for blocks of inky black to push neon and lantern color forward by contrast. The composition would likely play deep cuts of unmodulated dark against small areas of saturated red, yellow, or green, with figures or storefronts indicated economically rather than in detail. The mokuhanga process rewards this kind of tonal compression: a single sumi block carrying the night, a few additional blocks for the lights. Where Maekawa's more familiar bathhouse and country subjects emphasize warmth and ease, his urban night work places him alongside Onchi Kōshirō and Hiratsuka Un'ichi in registering the pace and atmosphere of interwar Tokyo through the sosaku-hanga sensibility.