Okabe: View of Mount Utsu (Okabe, Utsunoyama no zu), from the series "Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido (Tokaido gojusan tsugi)," also known as the Tokaido with Poem (Kyoka iri Tokaido)

Okabe: View of Mount Utsu is Utagawa Hiroshige's design for the twenty-first station on the Tokaido as it appears in the 1832 Kyoka iri Tokaido. The Art Institute of Chicago preserves the sheet (object 4340). Mount Utsu had long been associated in Japanese literature with the Ise monogatari, where a traveling courtier meets a wandering ascetic on the narrow forest path through the pass. Hiroshige draws on that literary residue by emphasizing the closed-in quality of the route, with steep wooded slopes pressing in on either side and travelers winding along the narrow road between. A stream cuts through the foreground rocks, and the foliage is built up in layered shapes of green and warm brown. Compared with the open coastal designs in the same series, this Edo ukiyo-e landscape print conveys a more enclosed, almost claustrophobic mood, and the inset kyoka verse cartouche functions as a literary anchor tying the picture to its long cultural memory. Hiroshige returned to Mount Utsu in several Tokaido series, each time experimenting with how to weight the human and natural elements of the pass. For collectors of Edo ukiyo-e travel prints, Okabe and its forested approach are among the most evocative stations of the road and a good demonstration of the artist's care in matching landscape to inherited literary tradition.