Kanaya: Kanaya Slope and Oi River (Kanaya, Kanaya saka, Oigawa)—No. 25, from the series "Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido (Tokaido gojusan tsugi)," also known as the Reisho Tokaido

Kanaya was the twenty-fourth station on the Tokaido and the western counterpart to Shimada across the broad, often impassable Oi River. Because bridges and ferries were forbidden on this stretch of the highway, travelers depended on teams of porters who waded the river carrying passengers on platforms or shoulder; long delays were common when the Oi was in flood. In this 1842 landscape print from Utagawa Hiroshige's Reisho Tokaido, the artist places Kanaya in its dramatic geography: the steep Kanaya Slope rising sharply from the river plain, the wide bed of the Oigawa, and the tiny processions of porters and travelers picking their way across the shallows. The series takes its nickname from the clerical-script (reisho) calligraphy in its cartouches and was issued by Maruseiya Jinpachi, one of Hiroshige's late-period Edo ukiyo-e landscape print sets reworking material from his celebrated Hoeido Tokaido. The Art Institute of Chicago's impression preserves the cool palette and patient draftsmanship that characterize the Reisho series, with subtle gradations in the river and shaded slope of Kanaya. As a record of Tokaido travel, the sheet captures both the physical effort and the bureaucratic ritual that defined this crossing, while turning the bend of the river and the rise of the road into a satisfying visual composition for an audience that mostly experienced the journey in print.