Togetsu Bridge at Arashiyama in Yamashiro Province (Yamashiro Arashiyama no Togetsu-kyō)

Togetsu Bridge at Arashiyama in Yamashiro Province (Yamashiro Arashiyama no Togetsu-kyō) is a landscape ukiyo-e print designed by Katsushika Hokusai around 1834 and now held in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum. The design forms part of the series Remarkable Views of Bridges in Various Provinces (Shokoku meikyō kiran), a sequence in which Edo ukiyo-e's leading landscape designer turned his attention to the distinctive bridges that anchored the topography and travel infrastructure of Edo-period Japan.

The Togetsu-kyō spans the Ōi River at Arashiyama on the western edge of Kyoto, a destination long celebrated in Japanese poetry and painting for its cherry blossoms in spring and brilliant maple foliage in autumn. Hokusai presents the bridge in cool, moonlit blues, the curve of its deck reaching from one wooded bank to the other while small figures cross with deliberate steps. The name Togetsu-kyō, literally moon-crossing bridge, alludes to a thirteenth-century anecdote in which a retired emperor remarked that the moon appeared to cross the bridge, and Hokusai's composition gestures at that lyrical association.

The colors are dominated by imported Prussian blue, used for water, sky, and shadowy hillside alike, with warmer ochre and brown notes reserved for the bridge itself and for thatched-roof structures on the near bank. Bokashi shading establishes the atmospheric distance of the further mountains and softens the surface of the river.

As a late landscape ukiyo-e print, Yamashiro Arashiyama no Togetsu-kyō illustrates how Katsushika Hokusai treated specific topographical sites as occasions for layered cultural memory, threading literary references and engineering achievements through compositions that remain immediately legible to viewers across centuries.