Ancient View of the Eight-planked Bridge in Mikawa Province (Mikawa no Yatsuhashi no kozu), from the series "Unusual Views of Famous Bridges in Various Provinces (Shokoku meikyo kiran)"

Ancient View of the Eight-planked Bridge in Mikawa Province (Mikawa no Yatsuhashi no kozu) is an ukiyo-e print by Katsushika Hokusai from the series Unusual Views of Famous Bridges in Various Provinces (Shokoku meikyo kiran), dated about 1828 and held in the Art Institute of Chicago. The eight-planked bridge at Yatsuhashi in Mikawa Province is one of the most famous locations in classical Japanese poetry, made canonical by the tenth-century Tales of Ise in which the wandering hero Ariwara no Narihira composes a poem on irises growing among the bridge's zigzagging planks. Hokusai's print revives this poetic geography for nineteenth-century viewers, showing the rustic wooden planks crossing through marshlands where irises and other wetland plants gather. Travelers, perhaps echoing Narihira himself, pause on the bridge or move across the marsh, their figures organized by the angular zigzag of the bridge structure. The composition uses bridges as compositional armature throughout the series, and Yatsuhashi's irregular form gives Hokusai particular freedom to dramatize geometry. As an Edo ukiyo-e print, the work depends on Prussian blue gradients for water and sky, careful tonal printing for foliage, and the spare linework that allows the bridge's planks to read with graphic clarity. The Art Institute of Chicago preserves this ukiyo-e print as part of its Katsushika Hokusai landscape series holdings.