The reader may already be acquainted with the Hoeidō series (1833-34) of The Fifty-Three Stations of the Tōkaidō, author's ISBN 978-1-64786-283-1. This was the most popular print series ever made in Japan.
In this Kyōka series (a different publisher, 1838) we follow Hiroshige on the same journey from Edo, modern day Tokyo, to Kyoto, when he travelled the road to participate in an important procession in 1832.
There were 53 post stations along this important road, apart from the start and terminus, in all 55 prints, which are all here in the order from Edo to Kyoto. The reader experiences the same journey with a completely different set of prints and can compare to the Hoeidō series.
It is possible to travel the same road today and some villages are still looking quite like they did back then. The postal stations were constructed between 1601 and 1624.
Utagawa Hiroshige (in Japanese: 歌川 広重), also called Andō Hiroshige (in Japanese: 安藤 広重;), was a Japanese ukiyo-e artist, considered the last great master of that tradition. He was born 1797 and died 12 October 1858.
Ukiyo-e is a genre of Japanese art which flourished from the 17th through 19th centuries. Its artists produced woodblock prints and paintings of such subjects as female beauties; kabuki actors and sumo wrestlers; scenes from history and folk tales; travel scenes and landscapes; flora and fauna; and erotica. The term ukiyo-e (浮世絵) translates as "picture[s] of the floating world".
Hiroshige is best known for his horizontal-format landscape series The Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō, which is the subject of this book, and for his vertical-format landscape series One Hundred Famous Views of Edo.
The main subjects of his work are considered atypical of the ukiyo-e genre, whose focus was more on beautiful women, popular actors, and other scenes of the urban pleasure districts of Japan's Edo period (1603-1868).
