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

Nissaka, from the series "Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido (Tokaido gojusan tsugi)," also known as the Tokaido with Poem (Kyoka iri Tokaido), is an early-1830s woodblock print by Utagawa Hiroshige. Nissaka was the twenty-fifth post station along the Tokaido and lay at the foot of Sayo no Nakayama, one of the more demanding stretches of mountain road between Edo and Kyoto. The pass had a strong association with the legend of the "night-weeping stone" (yonaki ishi), a tale that gave Nissaka a distinctly otherworldly aura among Edo travelers and that Hiroshige and his contemporaries returned to repeatedly in their landscape print designs. The Kyoka iri Tokaido pairs each station view with a comic kyoka poem in a cartouche, framing the road as both physical itinerary and shared literary space. In Hiroshige's Nissaka, the path winds steeply through wooded slopes, with travelers and porters working up or down the gradient and the legend's stone often signposted within the composition. The handling of foliage and topography shows the artist's typical economy: a few overlapping ridgelines, carefully spaced trees, and a controlled palette of greens, blues, and earth tones describe a complex passage with minimal fuss. This impression is held in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. Nissaka is a clear example of how Hiroshige used Edo ukiyo-e conventions to transmit place, story, and weather in a single page.