Bamboo Grove at Kume Village (Kumemura no chikuri), from the series “Eight Views of Ryukyu Islands (Ryukyu hakkei)”

Bamboo Grove at Kume Village (Kumemura no chikuri) is a Katsushika Hokusai ukiyo-e print from the series Eight Views of Ryukyu Islands (Ryukyu hakkei), dated about 1827 and held in the Art Institute of Chicago. The Ryukyu Kingdom, a tributary state lying south of Japan, was effectively closed to ordinary Edo travelers, but its envoys periodically visited Edo and Kyoto, generating fascination with its landscapes, dress, and customs. Hokusai designed this series without ever visiting the islands, working from earlier Chinese-language pictorial sources and from imagination. Kume village, near the royal capital Shuri, was a community of scholars and officials of Chinese descent, and its bamboo groves became one of the conventional 'eight views' celebrated in Ryukyuan poetry. The print frames slender bamboo stalks rising above winding paths and rooftops, with figures moving through filtered light. The design transposes the long East Asian tradition of the 'eight views' format, originally Chinese, onto an exotic Japanese-adjacent landscape. As an Edo ukiyo-e print, the work participates in the early nineteenth-century vogue for imagined foreign landscapes, while displaying Hokusai's technical command of tonal printing, atmospheric layering, and rhythmic vertical composition. The Art Institute of Chicago preserves this ukiyo-e print as a key example of Katsushika Hokusai's geographic and cultural imagination.