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

Ejiri, 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 in the Art Institute of Chicago, designed around 1832. Ejiri was the eighteenth station of the Tokaido, in present-day Shimizu (Shizuoka City), and was distinguished by its proximity to the natural harbour of Miho no Matsubara, the pine-grove peninsula on Suruga Bay celebrated in classical poetry and in the No play Hagoromo. Hiroshige's Hoeido Ejiri places the eye at a high vantage point overlooking the harbour and pine-shaded coastline. The Kyoka iri Tokaido version pairs the station with a kyoka verse and supplies a complementary design of the same locality. As an Edo ukiyo-e landscape print, the work draws on the long-standing reputation of Miho no Matsubara as one of Japan's most poetically charged sites, the kind of place where pictorial convention and literary allusion combined to give a single landscape unusual depth. Ejiri itself was a flourishing post town whose harbour handled coastal shipping and timber from the surrounding hinterland. Hiroshige's repeated returns to the area across his Tokaido series document the way an artist could reuse a single geographic setting to test different compositions, viewpoints, and seasonal moods. The Art Institute of Chicago's collection makes possible direct comparison of the Kyoka iri Ejiri with Hiroshige's other treatments, and the design rewards attention to how he balances classical allusion with the contemporary realities of a busy bayside town.