No. 2, Shower at Ryōgoku Bridge (Ryōgoku no yūdachi), from the series Comical Views of Famous Places in Edo

Shower at Ryōgoku Bridge (Ryōgoku no yūdachi), number 2 in Utagawa Hirokage's Edo meisho dōke zukushi ('Comical Views of Famous Places in Edo'), is a vertical ōban color woodblock print published in 1859 by Tsujiokaya Bunsuke. The Ryōgoku Bridge was one of the most celebrated meisho-e sites in Edo — the great wooden span over the Sumida River where the city's summer fireworks displays were held and where pedestrians and pleasure-boats crossed in dense traffic on warm evenings — and Hirokage builds his comic premise on the kind of sudden afternoon thunderstorm (yūdachi) for which the season was famous. The composition reimagines the standard meisho-e of the bridge as a slapstick fable: a kappa (a river imp from Japanese folklore) attacks a thunder deity who has tumbled into the river, trying to seize the deity's magical ball, while the deity counterattacks with a directed gust of intestinal wind. The combination of canonical Edo site, classical thunderstorm subject, and Rabelaisian comic premise is characteristic of the series and aligns Hirokage's work with the late-Edo tradition of gigaga (戯画, 'play pictures') practiced most famously by Utagawa Kuniyoshi. The Ōta Memorial Museum of Art in Tokyo holds an impression of this sheet, which featured in the museum's 2024 Hirokage retrospective.