PHAVOS™ · UNIVERSES · FLOATING WORLDS · DECEMBER 1885

Cooling off at Shijō

Tsukioka Yoshitoshi

One Hundred Aspects of the Moon · No. 10

01

The Artwork

Shijō Nōryō (四條納涼), usually translated as Cooling off at Shijō or Evening Cool at Shijō, was published in December 1885 as print no. 10 in Tsukioka Yoshitoshi’s One Hundred Aspects of the Moon.

A young woman sits on a platform over Kyoto’s Kamo River and lowers one foot into the water. The full moon hangs above her against a flat blue-green sky, while the red lining of her robe and the lantern beside her add small flashes of warmth to the scene.

02

The Artist

Tsukioka Yoshitoshi (1839–1892) worked through one of the most disruptive periods in Japanese visual culture, from the final years of the Tokugawa shogunate into the Meiji era. His prints moved between history, theatre, supernatural stories, warriors and scenes of ordinary life.

One Hundred Aspects of the Moon, published between 1885 and 1892, became one of his defining late series. The moon links the images, but the subjects range widely: famous figures, literary episodes, ghosts, animals and, as here, a quiet summer evening.

03

The Story

Shijō sits beside the Kamo River in central Kyoto. During the summer, the riverbank became a place to escape the heat, with temporary platforms, teahouses and restaurants extending over or beside the water.

Yoshitoshi reduces that seasonal custom to a single gesture. The woman does not perform for the viewer; she simply dips her foot into the river at the end of a hot day. The moon turns an ordinary act into something worth preserving.

The scene matters because almost nothing happens.

04

The PHAVOS™ Interpretation

Shijō Nōryō keeps the gesture intact.

05 · The Piece

Shijō Nōryō

Yoshitoshi’s 1885 summer scene carried across the back of a heavyweight cream hoodie, with the open field behind the figure reworked into PHAVOS™’s visual language.