Odawara, Sakawa-Gawa

Odawara, Sakawa-Gawa is one of Utagawa Hiroshige's repeated treatments of the ninth station on the Tōkaidō, where the highway crossed the broad gravel bed of the Sakawa River near the castle town of Odawara. Because the river had no fixed bridge, travelers were carried across by porters who waded through the shallow channels, and the scene of human-powered crossing became a signature image of the station in Hiroshige's landscape print work. In this design figures and palanquins are ferried over the water by groups of porters, with the foothills of the Hakone range rising in the distance and the broad expanse of gravel and braided channels filling the middle ground. The Edo ukiyo-e master uses cool tones of grey, blue, and sand to evoke the open, wind-scoured valley, while the small clustered figures introduce the human drama of the crossing. Odawara, where the road began its steep climb into the mountains, marked a transition in the highway and figured prominently in travel narratives of the period. The impression preserved on ukiyo-e.org records the work outside the major museum holdings and contributes to the documentation of Hiroshige's various reworkings of this iconic station across multiple Tōkaidō series.