Oiso — 大磯駅

Oiso is a sheet from Keisai Eisen's series Beautiful Women for the 53 Stations of the Tokaido (Tokaido gojusan-tsugi mitate bijin). Oiso was the eighth station on the Tokaido, on the Sagami coast between Hiratsuka and Odawara, and was already a literary place name by Eisen's time: it figured in the medieval tale of Soga no Goro and in classical poetry as the home of the courtesan Tora Gozen. Eisen's mitate design exploits these associations. Rather than the coastal landscape that Hiroshige would treat in his own Tokaido series, the print presents a single figure of a beauty whose costume and pose stand in for the station name. The figure is constructed with Eisen's mature Edo ukiyo-e idiom - elongated proportions, a confidently drawn outer robe, and the saturated palette of indigo, vermillion and black that he favoured in the late 1820s and 1830s. The sheet is preserved in the ukiyo-e.org archive (Eisen Keisai, Beautiful Women for the 53 Stations of the Tokaido, Oiso). As with the other sheets in the series, the Oiso bijin print depends on a viewer educated enough to recognise the cross-reference between station name and figure, a sophistication that was second nature to Edo townspeople who had grown up with the Tokaido as both a real road and a literary landscape.