Odawara

Odawara is a sheet from Keisai Eisen's series Beautiful Women for the 53 Stations of the Tokaido (Tokaido gojusan-tsugi mitate bijin). Odawara was the ninth station on the Tokaido and the principal castle town between Edo and the Hakone Pass, well known to travelers for the inns on the eastern approach and for its association with the powerful Hojo clan of the Sengoku period. In Hiroshige's straight landscape series the station is celebrated for the river crossing of the Sakawa; Eisen's mitate sheet, by contrast, replaces landscape with a single figure of a beauty and treats the station name as an allusive frame. The bijin is built with Eisen's mature Edo [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e) idiom - elongated neck, small head and a heavily drawn outer kimono whose patterns dominate the design. The print is preserved in the ukiyo-e.org archive (Eisen Keisai, Beautiful Women for the 53 Stations of the Tokaido, Odawara). The series is a key example of late-Edo [bijin-ga](/glossary/bijin-ga)'s ability to insert itself into one of the most heavily worked subject areas of ukiyo-e: by recasting the Tokaido as a portrait gallery of beauties, Eisen and his publisher carved out commercial and conceptual space alongside Hokusai's and Hiroshige's better-known topographical readings of the same road.