Nanko, from the series Scenes of Famous Places along the Tôkaidô Road (Tôkaidô meisho fûkei), also known as the Processional Tôkaidô (Gyôretsu Tôkaidô), here called Tôkaidô meisho no uchi

The fourth Nanko impression in this series continues the treatment of the landscape sacred to Kusunoki Masashige's memory, a subject that carried heightened political and ideological significance in the decades surrounding the Meiji Restoration of 1868. Kyosai was himself deeply enmeshed in the cultural politics of this transition, at times working for loyalist patrons, at others falling afoul of authorities for his satirical prints. The meisho-e format — with its conventions of elevated viewpoint, layered spatial recession, and schematic vegetation rendering — provided a socially legible framework within which Kyosai could deploy his more idiosyncratic graphic sensibility. Printed on washi with multiple woodblocks in the nishiki-e tradition, the composition likely uses water and open sky to create breathing space in the design, with the Nanko memorial or shrine architecture serving as a focal element that justifies the site's inclusion in a highway landscape series.