Night Illusion 161

Night Illusion 161 belongs to a numbered series of nocturnal works in which Shimura translates his recurring horizon motifs into a darkened tonal register. The title and high catalog number suggest an evening or moonlit landscape — open meadow or distant treeline dissolving into a graduated sky — built from successive flat color blocks rather than line drawing. Within the mokuhanga tradition, such atmospheric night scenes typically rely on broad bokashi gradations applied with the baren over moistened washi, holding the deepest pigment near the horizon and fading into a pale upper field. Shimura's wider practice, formed in the postwar Tokyo art-school environment and then in Cambridge from the late 1970s, treats the horizon and meadow as recurring subjects across both serigraph and woodblock; the Night Illusion sequence applies that same compositional vocabulary — quiet, depopulated, structurally minimal — to nocturnal light. The numbered title situates the print as one entry in an ongoing meditation on a single motif rather than a self-contained scene.