Okazaki, from the series Cut-out Pictures of Fifty-three Stations (Gojūsan tsugi harimaze)

Cut-out Pictures of Fifty-three Stations (Gojusan tsugi harimaze) is one of Utagawa Hiroshige's most inventive responses to the runaway success of his earlier Tokaido series. Each sheet in the set assembles several small landscape compositions on a single page, designed so that collectors could either keep them intact or scissor them apart and paste them into albums and screens, hence the term harimaze, meaning paste-mixed. This Okazaki sheet draws together vignettes associated with that Tokaido station, including the long Yahagi Bridge over the Yahagi River for which Okazaki was celebrated. The compositions are simplified and tightened to read clearly at small scale, with strong silhouettes and a limited but vivid palette typical of Edo ukiyo-e printing in the 1850s. Functioning at once as a landscape print, a memento of travel, and a kind of paper game, the sheet illustrates how Hiroshige and his publishers continually repackaged the Tokaido subject to keep it commercially fresh. The impression preserved at the Harvard Art Museums retains the crisp keyblock printing on which the harimaze format depends, since dull lines would obscure the cut edges.