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

Narumi, 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. Narumi was the fortieth station of the Tokaido, located in present-day Aichi Prefecture between Chiryu and Miya. It was nationally renowned for Narumi shibori, a refined tie-dye technique that produced indigo-on-white textiles displayed in long bolts in front of the shops lining the post road. Hiroshige's Hoeido Narumi placed shibori shops, with their hanging cloth and busy customers, at the centre of the design, and his various subsequent Tokaido series often returned to this textile economy as the defining feature of the station. The Kyoka iri Tokaido version revisits Narumi with a paired kyoka verse, recasting the scene through the lens of comic poetry. As an Edo ukiyo-e landscape print, the design demonstrates that Hiroshige's interest in the road was not confined to landscape forms but extended to the specific trades and crafts that gave each station its identity in print culture. Narumi shibori became one of the souvenir industries that supported Tokaido travel, and a print purchased on or after the journey served as a remembrance both of the route and of the local goods encountered along the way. The Art Institute of Chicago's collection preserves this and other Hiroshige Narumi designs, providing a rich basis for studying how one station's craft economy could shape generations of print imagery and become inseparable from the visual identity of the place.