Mount Nachi in Kii Province, No. 1 on the Saikoku Pilgrimage Route (Saikoku junrei ichiban Kishu Nachisan), from the series "The Miracles of Kannon (Kannon reigenki)"

Dated 1858, this Utagawa Toyokuni Edo [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e) woodblock print held by the Art Institute of Chicago is the first sheet of the series Kannon reigenki, The Miracles of Kannon. It depicts Mount Nachi in Kii Province, the first station of the Saikoku junrei, the thirty-three-temple pilgrimage circuit that Edo-period Japanese travelers undertook in honor of the bodhisattva Kannon. The series builds on the long tradition of pilgrimage and miracle-tale prints, organizing the thirty-three sites of the Saikoku route into a single collectable set in which each sheet pairs a station with a Kannon-related narrative. Mount Nachi - famous for its waterfall and for the temple complex that opens the pilgrimage - is rendered as both place and devotional subject, with the Utagawa workshop's printers handling the landscape elements alongside the figural and emblematic content. The composition places identifying elements of Nachi within a framework that announces the series title, the station number, and the place name in cartouches positioned to clarify the sheet's role within the larger thirty-three-print run. Toyokuni's drawing carries the design with the firm contour line and disciplined likeness conventions familiar from his actor work, applied here to figures and setting at devotional rather than theatrical scale. The Art Institute's record gives the series title, station identification, and date; in the public record consulted here, no further textual content from the inscriptions is asserted beyond what that catalog supports. The sheet documents the breadth of subjects the Utagawa Toyokuni studio handled in its late years.