Returning Sails at Yabase (Yabase no kihan), No. 3 from the series "Eight Views of Omi"

Number three from Shigenaga's Eight Views of Omi, this hosoban urushi-e in the Art Institute of Chicago depicts Yabase no kihan, returning sails at Yabase, the port on the eastern shore of Lake Biwa where boats crossing to and from Otsu put in at day's end. The returning sails theme, taken from the Chinese Xiao-Xiang Eight Views, was poetically valued for the suggestion of homecoming and the visual interest of sails caught against the late light. Shigenaga uses the hosoban format to set foreground figures against the implied lake and sails beyond, the urushi-e technique adding hand-brushed lacquer ink for darks and beni for selective passages of color. The Yabase crossing was a practical part of mid-Edo travel infrastructure as well as a poetic subject; Shigenaga's print thus operates simultaneously as topographic citation and as bijin-ga, an economy of meaning typical of the artist's series work. The Art Institute's holdings of his Omi sheets allow scholars to study Shigenaga's compositional decisions as a sustained landscape program decades before the genre's later flowering.