Woman Passing a Roadside Shop Near Oji

Woman Passing a Roadside Shop Near Oji is an early genre subject by Katsushika Hokusai, attributed around 1800 and held by the Cleveland Museum of Art. Oji, a village in the northern outskirts of Edo, was famous for its waterfall, its Inari shrine, and its scenic role as a stop for excursions out of the city. In this design, Hokusai depicts a fashionable young woman walking past a small wayside teahouse or shop, where attendants pause as she approaches. The print belongs to the period when Hokusai was still working largely in figural and bijinga modes, before his great landscape series of the late 1820s and 1830s, and it shows the influence of his teacher Katsukawa Shunsho and of the bijinga tradition of Kitagawa Utamaro. As an Edo ukiyo-e print, this image documents both fashion - the cut of the woman's kimono, the way her sash is tied - and a particular suburban leisure destination that Edo residents would have recognized immediately. The Cleveland Museum of Art impression preserves the soft palette and finely drawn linework characteristic of Hokusai's turn-of-the-century work. For viewers most familiar with the elderly Hokusai of the Mount Fuji landscapes, this print offers a striking contrast: a younger artist refining his observational eye on figures in a recognizable Edo setting, and beginning to weave landscape and bijin into the single picture plane that would become his hallmark.