Driving Rain at Shōno, from Fifty-Three Stations of the Tokaidō

Driving Rain at Shono is one of the most famous Japanese prints of any period, the forty-fifth station design from Utagawa Hiroshige's breakthrough series Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido, published around 1833 by Hoeido. A sudden mountain rainstorm pours down across the bare slopes outside the Shono station on the road from Edo to Kyoto. Travellers are caught mid-stride: a palanquin bearer bends low and runs up the path with passengers inside, two figures bring an umbrella over their heads, and bamboo and pine groves along the ridge are bent toward the wind. Hiroshige renders the rain itself with fine parallel lines printed directly across the entire composition, producing a sheet of weather rather than a sheet showing weather. Different blocks supply different angles of rain, and the bokashi gradation of sky moves between black and dark grey in patches, giving the storm structure as well as movement. As an Edo ukiyo-e landscape print, Shono compresses figure, weather, and topography into a single dramatic event with a directness that would prove enormously influential for later printmakers in Japan and Europe. The Cleveland Museum of Art preserves an impression of the design within its strong holdings of nineteenth-century Japanese prints. Together with Kambara and Hakone, Shono is one of the three or four absolutely essential designs from the Hoeido Tokaido for serious collectors.