Both Banks of the Sumida River in One View

Both Banks of the Sumida River in One View, dated 1803, is a Katsushika Hokusai illustrated book held by the Victoria and Albert Museum. The volume presents a panoramic survey of the Sumida River through Edo, picturing landmarks, ferry crossings, theatres, teahouses, and seasonal observances as the reader turns the pages from one neighborhood to the next. The Sumida was the city's central artery, and a [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e) print designer of Hokusai's standing was well placed to organize such a guidebook because he had spent his life within the riverside districts that anchored Edo's commercial and recreational life. The book is an important early example of Hokusai's serial geographic imagination, which would later produce the Thirty-six Views of Mt. Fuji, the Tour of Waterfalls, and the Eight Views of the Ryukyu Islands. Each opening combines topographic accuracy with the figural shorthand of Edo ukiyo-e, and the cumulative effect is a sustained literary and visual experience of the city. The Victoria and Albert Museum preserves the volume within its extensive Japanese illustrated-book collection, where it documents both the publishing economy of early nineteenth-century Edo and the artist's developing landscape sensibility. For modern scholars the book is a primary source on the spatial and social geography of the Sumida around 1800, and a key step in Hokusai's transformation from a figural designer into the great landscape master of late Edo Japan.