Futagawa

Futagawa was the thirty-third post station on the Tokaido, located in present-day Toyohashi, Aichi Prefecture. The station is associated historically with Sarugababa, the so-called monkey ridge, and the Kashiwaya teahouse documented in Hiroshige's 1830s rendering. Sekino's Futagawa forms part of his fifty-five-print Tokaido series, executed between 1960 and 1974, in which he revisited each historical station in a contemporary idiom. His treatment of post stations frequently records the residual remains of the old highway, a tiled roofline, a stone marker, a stretch of road empty of the foot traffic that once defined it, registering the displacement of the route by twentieth-century rail and motorway. Carved and printed entirely by Sekino in keeping with sosaku-hanga principles, the print exemplifies his use of the oban format, his disciplined palette, and his preference for strong simplified silhouettes over the dense narrative incident characteristic of Edo-period meisho-e.