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

Hodogaya, from Utagawa Hiroshige's Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido (Tokaido gojusan tsugi), Tokaido with Poem (Kyoka iri Tokaido) version, dates to around 1832 and is held in the Art Institute of Chicago. Hodogaya was the fourth post town out of Edo on the Tokaido and lay just beyond Kanagawa on a stretch of road that climbed gently away from the bay. In this Edo ukiyo-e landscape print, Hiroshige stages the town along a curving road, with thatched and tiled-roofed buildings stepping into the distance and travelers moving through the foreground. Porters, palanquin bearers, and commoners on foot animate the road, while a horse and rider or a small group of pilgrims may pause at the edge of the lane. The composition relies on a balance between architectural mass and open sky, with low hills behind the town rendered in graded bokashi to suggest distance. Above or beside the image, the Kyoka iri Tokaido inserts an inscribed kyoka, a comic thirty-one-syllable verse contributed by a member of the poetry circles that supplied the project with its literary content. The combination of image and poem links Hiroshige's visual record of the highway to the playful urban literary culture of late-Edo Japan, in which kyoka clubs documented the country's famous places in verse. The Hodogaya sheet thus participates not only in the artist's broader Tokaido project but also in the wider Edo enthusiasm for travel literature.