Old View of the Eight-part Bridge at Yatsuhashi in Mikawa Province (Mikawa no Yatsuhashi no kozu)

Old View of the Eight-part Bridge at Yatsuhashi in Mikawa Province (Mikawa no Yatsuhashi no kozu), designed about 1834, depicts the legendary zigzag bridge at Yatsuhashi celebrated in the Heian classic Tales of Ise. Katsushika Hokusai's print shows the wooden walkway picking its way across an iris marsh, with travelers crossing the angled boards as the irises bloom and a distant mountain rises in the background. The composition exemplifies Hokusai's late landscape style: a powerful geometric structure of plank, water, and plant arranged to read instantly while still rewarding sustained inspection. The Victoria and Albert Museum impression preserves the rich greens of the marsh, the cool blues of the water, and the careful registration of the wooden bridge planks. As an Edo ukiyo-e print, the design belongs to Hokusai's series Remarkable Views of Bridges in Various Provinces (Shokoku meikyō kiran), one of his most ambitious late landscape projects, and demonstrates how the artist used the woodblock medium to layer architecture, botany, and literary memory in a single image. The Yatsuhashi site had been a beloved poetic subject for nearly a thousand years before Hokusai depicted it, and his composition both honors and reinvents the tradition, treating the bridge less as a path than as a meditation on movement and the passage of time. Katsushika Hokusai's ability to bring this depth of cultural reference to a ukiyo-e print is one of the hallmarks of his late work, and surviving impressions of this design are prized for their landscape clarity and for their rich relationship to classical Japanese literature.