Kai Province: Monkey Bridge (Kai, Saruhashi), from the series "Famous Places in the Sixty-odd Provinces (Rokujuyoshu meisho zue)"

Dated 1853, this landscape print by Utagawa Hiroshige depicts the famous Saruhashi, or Monkey Bridge, a slender wooden span hanging over the deep gorge of the Katsura River in Kai Province. The composition is dominated by sheer rock cliffs on either side, plunging vertically into shadow, with the narrow bridge stretching across the void near the top. Two small figures cross the bridge with cautious steps, dwarfed by the surrounding precipices. According to tradition, the Saruhashi was designed after watchful monkeys spanning the gorge by leaping from branch to branch, hence the name, and it had been a celebrated meisho since at least the Heian period. The print belongs to Hiroshige's ambitious series Famous Places in the Sixty-odd Provinces (Rokujuyoshu meisho zue), produced for the publisher Koshimuraya Heisuke between 1853 and 1856 in the vertical o-ban format that suited gorges, waterfalls, and other vertical subjects especially well. As with many provinces, Hiroshige relied on earlier visual sources for Kai, but his transformation of those sources into a single dramatic composition is wholly his own. The use of bokashi gradation along the cliff faces deepens the canyon, while restrained color registration in the foliage and rock textures gives the print a stark elegance. This impression is preserved in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, where it exemplifies the dramatic vertical landscape print possibilities of late Edo ukiyo-e.