Futagawa, from the series "Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido (Tokaido gojusan tsugi)"

Futagawa, from the series Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido (Tokaido gojusan tsugi), is a small ukiyo-e print designed by Katsushika Hokusai around 1801. The Futagawa station, located in present-day Aichi Prefecture, sat on a stretch of the great highway associated with an open plain, and Hokusai's sheet uses the location to register the character of an inland post-town surrounded by relatively level ground. Travelers move through the foreground in compact groupings, station buildings cluster along the road, and the surrounding terrain opens enough to suggest the broader landscape in which the station functioned. The print's modest sheet size and restrained palette suit the early-nineteenth-century print culture in which compact Tokaido sets reached Edo readers curious about the road between the shogun's capital and Kyoto. As an Edo ukiyo-e print, the design illustrates Katsushika Hokusai's structural method for treating each station, in which architecture, topography, and human movement combine into a single legible composition. The impression is preserved in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. For collectors and students of ukiyo-e print history, Hokusai's Futagawa offers a useful early example of his inland station imagery, demonstrating the careful observational habits that would inform his mature landscape masterpieces decades later, when stations and travelers became central to his greatest pictorial inventions.