Mariko—No. 21, from the series "Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido (Tokaido gojusan tsugi)," also known as the Reisho Tokaido

Mariko, the twenty-first station in Utagawa Hiroshige's Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido (Tokaido gojusan tsugi), Reisho Tokaido version, dates to around 1842 and is held by the Art Institute of Chicago. Mariko was a small post town in Suruga Province best known for tororojiru, a grated yam-broth dish served in roadside teahouses; Hiroshige had already enshrined this specialty in his celebrated 1833 Mariko design, and the Reisho Tokaido revisits the same subject in a fresh composition. In this Edo ukiyo-e landscape print he focuses on the teahouse and its immediate surroundings, with the thatched structure set among trees beside the highway. Travelers pause at the open front of the shop, where attendants serve bowls of tororojiru, while others continue along the road in the background. The composition balances the human-scale incident of the teahouse with the surrounding landscape, in which low hills and roadside vegetation are organized in gentle diagonals. Hiroshige uses warm earth tones for the road and structures and cooler greens for foliage, with bokashi gradation softening the transitions. As a later treatment of a station the artist had already made famous, the Mariko sheet shows how the Reisho Tokaido functioned as a more measured, refined revisitation of the Tokaido subject rather than a radical reinvention; it confirms how local food culture had become inseparable from the visual identity of a given post town in the meisho-e tradition.