Chiryu, from the series "Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido (Tokaido gojusan tsugi)," also known as the Tokaido with Poem (Kyoka iri Tokaido)

Chiryu, from the series Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido (Tokaido gojusan tsugi), also known as the Tokaido with Poem (Kyoka iri Tokaido), is a landscape print by Utagawa Hiroshige produced around 1832 and now in the Art Institute of Chicago. Chiryu was the thirty-ninth station of the Tokaido, in present-day Aichi Prefecture between Ikeda and Narumi, and was associated in Edo memory with the great horse market held there each spring on the open Chiryu plain. Hiroshige's designs of Chiryu, including the celebrated Hoeido version, often centre on this expanse and on the horses, traders, and trees that punctuated it. In the Kyoka iri Tokaido a kyoka verse is integrated into the design, encouraging the viewer to read the landscape through the lens of comic poetry. The flatness of the Chiryu plain made it a notable stretch of the route, a place where the road opened out between hilly sections and where seasonal events animated the otherwise quiet meadow. As an entry in the broader Edo ukiyo-e landscape print tradition, Chiryu reminds us that the Tokaido was not only a sequence of bridges, rivers, and shrines, but also a corridor through specific local economies, of which horse markets, salt production, paper making, and rice cultivation each left their visual imprint. The Art Institute of Chicago's holdings of Hiroshige's Tokaido prints, including this Kyoka iri version, allow viewers to trace how the same station could be re-staged across multiple series, with each new design honouring a slightly different aspect of the place's geography or commercial life.