One Hundred Famous Views of Edo No.90Evening scene of Saruwaka cho

During the Edo period, noh plays were an amusement for the warrior class, while kabuki plays were for commoners. In earlier times, famous kabuki theatres were located in the centre of the city at Nihonbashi and Kyobashi.
The Tokugawa shogunate considered kabuki morally decadent and did not want its influence to spread among the Edo citizens. Therefore, the shogunate initiated a policy to remove the theatres from the centre of the city to a more remote area.
The shogunate was presented with a fine opportunity to carry out this plan when a fire started at a theatre called Moritaza in 1841. The proprietors and actors were ordered to move immediately to a desolate place, a paddy field north of Asakusa. The area was named Saruwaka-cho, after Kanzaburo Saruwaka, the founder of kabuki.
Reluctantly, the proprietors and actors complied with the order by erecting simple playhouses at Saruwaka-cho the following year and continuing their performances there. However, ironically — and contrary to the expectations of the shogunate — kabuki plays flourished there for many years until the end of the Edo period.
The print pictures a street running through Saruwaka-cho, which is crowded with people. Along the street on the right stand kabuki theatres and, on the left, teahouses. Each kabuki theatre had a wooden “yagura” framework on its roof, which indicated that it had a performance right granted by the shogunate. The theatres in this print from right to left are Moritaza, Ichimuraza and Nakamuraza. The teahouses offered seat-booking services in the theatres and provided foods to the visitors during intermission or when the play was over. In those days, kabuki plays started very early in the morning, around 2 a.m., and lasted up to 5 o’clock in the evening.
The full moon in the sky throws light over the people and casts their shadows on the ground. This print is the only one in this series that Hiroshige drew with shadows, in the style of Western-style paintings.
Hiroshige created this print using perspective which he probably learned from Western paintings. The rule of perspective says that parallel limes must converge at a point in the distance. In this print, Hiroshige left the convergence ambiguous or, rather, unpainted. Ironically, one can find Impressionist paintings which used perspective in the similar way. One example is “A Cart on the Snowy Road at Honfleur” by Claude Monet.