Yoshiwara: The Famous Sight of Mount Fuji on the Left (Yoshiwara, meisho hidari Fuji)—No. 15, from the series "Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido (Tokaido gojusan tsugi)," also known as the Reisho Tokaido

Yoshiwara, the fourteenth post station on the Tokaido (numbered fifteenth when counted from the Nihonbashi starting point), lay in Suruga Province along the broad coastal plain south of Mount Fuji. It was famous to travelers for a quirk of orientation: Hidari Fuji, the place on the road where Mount Fuji appears unexpectedly on the left rather than the right as one travels west. In this 1842 landscape print from Utagawa Hiroshige's Reisho Tokaido, the artist takes this geographic oddity as his subject, building the composition around the silhouette of Fuji rising over the pines to the left of the road. The series, published by Maruseiya Jinpachi, draws its nickname from the clerical-script (reisho) calligraphy in its title cartouches; it is one of several full Tokaido sets Hiroshige produced in his mature career as Edo ukiyo-e landscape prints continued to dominate the market for popular topography. The Art Institute of Chicago's impression preserves the cool palette and steady draftsmanship characteristic of the Reisho series, with small travelers along the road giving scale to the mountain in the distance. As at many Tokaido stations, Hiroshige uses local landmarks not merely as picturesque incident but as recognizable markers that would have anchored the print for any reader who had heard about Hidari Fuji from previous travelers or guidebooks.