Sudden Shower at Shōno

Edo, 1834. A carver’s bench, imagined.

The design came over from the artist’s studio pasted face down on the block, a thin sheet with Hiroshige’s brush lines showing through the back, and the carver’s first job was to destroy it. That is how it works. You glue the drawing to the wood and cut through it, and by the time the block is finished the drawing is gone, shredded into the gouges, and only your lines remain.

The figures went quickly. Two bearers running uphill with a palanquin slung on a pole, its straw cover flapping. A man beside them leaning into the slope, one hand clamping his hat. Two more coming the other way, heads down in straw rain-capes, one holding a big oiled-paper umbrella tilted into the wind like a shield. Their bare legs, their straw sandals, their hurry. A few seconds of scramble on a slope above the village of Shōno, where the roofs at the right sit hunched in grey.

The rain took him two days.

It was all lines, hundreds of them, fine as hairs and dead straight, slanting down from upper right to lower left on a single angle, some long, some broken short, so that the shower would look thick in one place and thinning in another. One slip of the knife and a line would fatten or wander, and every printed sheet would carry the mistake forever. He cut them with his breath held. Behind the rain, the bamboo and trees on the hillside bend under the wind in layers of grey, one shade behind another, the farthest ones nearly gone.

Then the printers took over. They would brush the grey on and wipe it to a gradient, darker at the top of the sky, and pull sheet after sheet, enough for a crowd of buyers who wanted a station of the Tōkaidō road to keep at home. Sudden Shower at Shōno became one of the best loved prints in the series.

Hiroshige’s signature and seals sit at the left, the title written in a column at upper left. The carver’s share is the slant: that precise downpour, cut a hair at a time, which makes your shoulders lift a little when you look at it.