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

This Otsu station print is one of Utagawa Hiroshige's contributions to the 1832 Kyoka iri Tokaido, the version of the Fifty-Three Stations of the Tokaido in which each landscape carries a kyoka verse. The Art Institute of Chicago holds the sheet (object 4418), with the artist's familiar combination of road, figures, and distant landform clearly preserved. Otsu was the fifty-third and final station on the Tokaido before Kyoto, set on the southern shore of Lake Biwa and known for its produce markets and the brushy folk paintings called Otsu-e sold to travelers. Hiroshige does not illustrate the famous folk pictures here but instead concentrates on the working life of the post town, with porters, packhorses, and travelers moving along the road. The horizontal pull of the highway and the gentle rise of the surrounding hills place the composition firmly within the conventions of Edo ukiyo-e landscape print design. As with other sheets in the Kyoka iri series, the small verse cartouche functions as a literary frame, inviting the buyer to read image and poem as a single statement. For modern collectors, the print is interesting both as the closing image of a long road and as evidence of how thoroughly Hiroshige reworked the Tokaido formula across publishers and decades. The 1832 set, less dramatic than the Hoeido series, rewards patient attention to its smaller textures.