Tokaido: Hiroshige by Tomikichiro TokurikiMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Inspired by The Fifty Three Stations of the Tokaido, a series of ukiyo-e woodcut prints created by Utagawa Hiroshige after his first travel along the Tōkaidō in 1832, the author offers colored plates of the ukiyo-e. While in color, these are unfortunately small plates -- a bit smaller than a typical postcard. Added to these plates is retrospective commentary, photography, and commentary. The author looks back from the industrial age over asphalt and automobiles to Hiroshige's pre-industrial depictions of The Tōkaidō road linking the shōgun's capital, Edo, to the imperial one, Kyōto. This main travel and transport artery of old Japan was traversed then over weeks by this intrepid traveler who once spent three years on the road.. We know about this fact of Hiroshige who created some 30 different series of woodcut prints on it due to the biographical and historical addenda which includes techniques to detect frequent forgeries. Often in the commentary, parallels in Hiroshige's composition are drawn to Shank's Mare: Japan's Great Comic Novel of Travel & Ribaldry.
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