Autumn Showers (Shigure), frontispiece illustration from the literary magazine Bungei kurabu 10, no. 13

Autumn Showers (Shigure), the frontispiece illustration from Bungei kurabu volume 10, number 13, dated 1904, is a colour-printed [kuchi-e](/glossary/kuchi-e) by Suzuki Kason produced for the principal Tokyo literary journal of the late Meiji period. The Japanese seasonal term shigure refers to the cold drizzling rains that fall between autumn and winter and that had been celebrated since classical waka poetry as one of the most evocative atmospheric signatures of the seasonal cycle. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston holds this impression (collections.mfa.org/objects/130006) within its outstanding collection of Meiji woodblock prints. Suzuki Kason (1860-1919) trained in the Kazan lineage through Kobayashi Eitaku and brought a literati-derived attention to brush line and to atmospheric rendering directly into the commercial kuchi-e idiom that the Hakubunkan literary magazines required. The Bungei Kurabu frontispieces typically tipped a colour-printed image into the opening of each monthly issue, and the kuchi-e genre depended on designers who could organise a single emotionally resolved subject within the upright tipped-in format. The composition for shigure traditionally pairs a figure, often a woman in seasonal dress, with the visual cues of cold autumn rain: an umbrella or hood, a slightly hunched posture, falling water rendered through linework, and a muted seasonal palette. Within Kason's career, the print belongs to the central run of Bungei Kurabu frontispieces of the early 1900s, and the survival of the Shigure subject across multiple institutional collections, including the parallel Metropolitan Museum of Art impression and the Honolulu Museum of Art's holding of an Autumn Shower from the same year, indicates the popularity of the design and the standard Meiji practice of multiple impressions circulating from a single block-set into both domestic and international collections.