No. 5, Hodogaya: Distant View of the Kamakura Mountains from the Boundary Tree Posthouse (Hodogaya, Kyōboku tateba Kamakurayama enbō), from the series Famous Sights of the Fifty-three Stations (Gojūsan tsugi meisho zue), also known as the Vertical Tōkaidō

No. 5, Hodogaya: Distant View of the Kamakura Mountains, from Utagawa Hiroshige's Gojūsan tsugi meisho zue, known as the Vertical Tōkaidō, returns the Edo ukiyo-e landscape artist to the highway that had launched his career, this time in tall single-sheet format. Hodogaya was the fifth station on the Tōkaidō, set in hilly country between Kanagawa and Totsuka, and the boundary-tree posthouse (kyōboku tateba) was a rest stop along the road where travelers paused before continuing inland. The vertical composition lets Hiroshige build a deep recession from foreground travelers and a teahouse to a middle ground of road and trees and finally to the distant mass of the Kamakura mountains, with the Pacific suggested beyond. The landscape print conventions he had developed in his earlier horizontal Tōkaidō are reworked here for the taller format, with greater emphasis on stacked planes and a stronger sense of altitude. The Vertical Tōkaidō belongs to the later phase of his career when publishers and audiences had appetite for new variations on the road that had become his signature subject, and the Hodogaya design demonstrates the continuing fertility of that engagement. The Harvard Art Museums impression preserves a documented example of the series and lets the Hodogaya view be compared with Hiroshige's earlier renderings of the same station.