Couple eloping, from the Akutagawa episode in the Tales of Ise

Departing from the strict topography of his most famous meisho-e, this print by Utagawa Hiroshige illustrates the Akutagawa episode from the tenth-century Tales of Ise (Ise monogatari), a classical narrative cycle that supplied subjects to Japanese painters and poets for nearly a thousand years. In the episode, the courtier Narihira spirits a forbidden noblewoman across the Akutagawa River by night; the lovers shelter in a storehouse where, in the original tale, she is devoured by a demon while Narihira sleeps. Hiroshige fixes on the tenderest moment, the elopement itself, with the lover bearing the woman on his back across the dark water under a thin moon, the reeds at the bank brushed in with a single saturated tone. Although Hiroshige is most associated with landscape print and Edo ukiyo-e cityscapes, throughout his career he also produced classical literary subjects and bird-and-flower designs that anchored him in the broader tradition of the Utagawa school. The understated palette, the calligraphic poem inscribed at the upper margin, and the deliberately archaic figure types align this sheet with the literati taste of mid-nineteenth-century Edo collectors. The Art Institute of Chicago preserves this impression among its Hiroshige holdings.