Shinano Province: The Moon Reflected in the Sarashina Rice Fields near Mount Kyôdai (Shinano, Sarashina tagoto no tsuki, Kyōdaisan), from the series Famous Places in the Sixty-Odd Provinces (Rokujūyoshū meisho zue)

Dated 1853, this landscape print by Utagawa Hiroshige depicts the moon reflected in the terraced rice fields of Sarashina near Mount Kyodai in Shinano Province, an effect known as tagoto no tsuki, the moon in every field. The composition presents a steep hillside carved into hundreds of small irregular paddies, each holding water that catches the light of the harvest moon high above, while Mount Kyodai rises in the distance and tiny figures on a winding path gaze upward. Sarashina, in present-day Nagano Prefecture, had been celebrated since the Heian period as one of the canonical sites for moon viewing, and the conceit that the moon multiplied itself across the flooded terraces drew on a long lineage of waka poetry. Hiroshige's design belongs to his ambitious vertical series Famous Places in the Sixty-odd Provinces (Rokujuyoshu meisho zue), an Edo ukiyo-e cartography of meisho produced for the publisher Koshimuraya Heisuke between 1853 and 1856. The vertical o-ban format suits the climbing slope of paddies, with the eye drawn upward from the foreground figures to the mountain and the moon. Bokashi gradation softens the sky, and the careful registration of silver-white reflections in the terraced fields produces a delicate visual rhyme between earth and sky. This impression is preserved in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, where it documents Hiroshige's gift for marrying poetic tradition to topographical landscape print imagery.