Lake Biwa

This [chuban](/glossary/chuban)-format nocturne, measuring roughly 18 by 25 cm, belongs to the Night Scenes (Yoru no fūkei) series that Hasegawa-Nishinomiya began issuing in the 1910s and continued to print into the 1930s. Lake Biwa, Japan's largest freshwater lake, was a perennial subject in Edo-period landscape prints, but Shōda Kōhō's version is unmistakably twentieth-century in feeling: two small figures stand in a flat-bottomed boat holding a single hanging lantern, their reflection ghosted in the still water, the far shore lost in mist. The print is rendered in the restrained sepia palette typical of the series — warm browns and creamy off-white paper modulated by deeper umber for the boat hull and a single point of opalescent light at the lantern. The composition is a study in nocturnal silence: the figures are turned away from the viewer, the lake is empty around them, and the only suggestion of movement is the soft transition of tone between water and sky. Shōda issued the design in both sepia and indigo-blue colorways; the publisher Nishinomiya catalogued it as number 1247. The work is one of the most frequently cited examples of the Night Scenes set and is broadly distributed in private collections; documented impressions are held at the Japanese Art Open Database from the Robert O. Muller research files.