View of Yanagishima

Yanagishima, meaning Willow Island, sits along the Sumida River in eastern Tokyo and was historically associated with Hokoji temple and seasonal poetry on willows. A meisho-e of this site would emphasize the willows themselves — their drooping forms calling for careful linework — alongside the river, possibly with boats or the small bridges connecting the island to the mainland. The compositional vocabulary of pre-modern meisho-e treatments by Hokusai and Hiroshige would have informed Oda's approach, but his Western-painting training pushes the print toward atmospheric flatness and a sense of movement — currents in the water, wind through the foliage — rather than encyclopedic detail. As a published ukiyo-e scholar, Oda was unusually conscious of how he was inheriting and revising this iconographic tradition, and his Yanagishima would read as a deliberate dialogue with the Edo-period prints that defined the site.