River Memory 159

River Memory 159 is one in a numbered sequence in which Shimura returns repeatedly to flowing water as subject. The title implies a remembered rather than directly observed landscape, and works in this group typically depict a band of water set within a reduced, almost diagrammatic frame — banks suggested rather than described, the river surface treated as a long horizontal field. In mokuhanga, such effects depend on careful bokashi printing across a single block to render the quiet shifts of color along the water's length, with separate blocks carrying the bordering land masses and overhead sky. The decision to number rather than uniquely title each variant aligns this practice with the serial sensibility he developed across his serigraph editions of meadows, woods, and horizons, where small compositional or chromatic shifts distinguish closely related impressions. River Memory belongs to that broader project: a measured cycling through a small set of landscape archetypes — meadow, forest, snow, river, horizon — translated here into the language of the woodblock.