Kiso River- at Inuyama — 木曽川

Kiso River at Inuyama shows the view from one of Japan's most scenic river locations, where the Kiso River passes through a narrow gorge near the castle town of Inuyama in Aichi Prefecture. Inuyama Castle, one of the oldest surviving original castles in Japan, sits on a bluff directly above this stretch of water, and the area has been famous for centuries for ukai, the traditional practice of cormorant fishing conducted on summer nights by torchlight.

This oban woodblock print captures the river's movement through the confined gorge, where the current accelerates between rocky banks. Shuho renders the water's surface with attention to its shifting patterns of reflection and turbulence, skills more commonly associated with landscape specialists like Kawase Hasui. The Inuyama setting places this print within the genre of meisho-e, images of famous places that served both as art objects and as visual souvenirs for an increasingly mobile Japanese public.