Night View of a Ginza Store

A brick Ginza storefront glows with gaslight against the deep blue of a Tokyo night, its warm windows spilling onto an all-but-empty street. It belongs to the kōsen-ga or 'light-ray pictures' pioneered by Kobayashi Kiyochika, whose pupil Inoue Yasuji became the most gifted exponent before dying at twenty-five. Working in the 1880s as Meiji Japan rebuilt itself with Western brick, gas, and glass, Yasuji caught the strange new atmosphere of the modern illuminated city with an almost photographic stillness. The mood of solitude and artificial light anticipates the urban night pictures of Western painters like Edward Hopper by half a century. Impressions are held at the Ota Memorial Museum of Art, Tokyo, and other print collections.