No. 39, Mannen Bridge at Fukagawa (Fukagawa Mannen-bashi), from the series Comical Views of Famous Places in Edo

Mannen Bridge at Fukagawa (Fukagawa Mannen-bashi), number 39 in Utagawa Hirokage's Edo meisho dōke zukushi ('Comical Views of Famous Places in Edo'), is a vertical ōban color woodblock print published in 1860 by Tsujiokaya Bunsuke. The print depicts the Mannen Bridge over the Onagigawa canal in the Fukagawa district east of the Sumida River, a site immortalized by Hokusai's earlier 'Fuji Seen Below Mannen Bridge' from the Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji. Hirokage's treatment reframes Hokusai's serene composition as a slapstick scene: where Hokusai's print had used the bridge's arch to frame a distant view of Mount Fuji glimpsed across the bay, Hirokage substitutes a barque and fishing nets and stages the action as a comic mishap on the bridge itself. The substitution is characteristic of the series, which systematically takes well-known meisho-e (famous-place picture) compositions and reanimates them with the falling porters, gusts of wind, and pratfalls of late-Edo comic theater. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston holds an impression of this sheet (object 537071, William Sturgis Bigelow Collection), part of a substantial American holding of the dōke zukushi assembled in the early twentieth century during the great age of Bostonian collecting of Japanese woodblock prints.