Nakasu

Nakasu is the small island district in central Tokyo where the Sumida and Nihonbashi rivers meet, historically a quarter of teahouses and entertainments and, by Ono's lifetime, a dense block of low buildings flanked by working waterways. The print likely depicts the riverside aspect of the neighborhood — perhaps low rooftops, a bridge approach, or the line of shops that face the water — observed in the descriptive but graphically simplified manner that characterized Ono's Tokyo subjects. Ono had been documenting the working districts of the city since the 1930s, when his stark black-and-white prints of factories, dockworkers, and back streets aligned him with the social-realist current of the sosaku-hanga movement. Nakasu, with its proximity to the Nihonbashi mercantile core and its quieter mid-twentieth-century atmosphere, fits within that long-running engagement with Tokyo as a subject. As a self-cut and self-printed mokuhanga, the impression carries the artist's own carving marks, with linear architecture and tonal fields of water and sky resolved through the woodblock itself rather than through copyist intermediaries.