Utagawa Kunisada (歌川国貞) / Toyokuni III (三代豊国) (artist 1786 – 01/12/1865)
View of Okabe (Okabe no zu: 岡部之図) from the chuban series Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō Road (Tōkaidō gojūsan tsugi no uchi: 東海道五十三次之内)
ca 1838
Signed: ōju Kunisada ga (応需国貞画)
Publisher: Sanoya Kihei
Censor's seal: kiwame
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
National Diet Library
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston - Hiroshige's Okabe: Utsu no yama (岡部 宇津の山)
Museum für angewandte Kunst, Vienna
Ishikawa Prefectural Museum of Art - they date their copy to 1836
Bryn Mawr
Honolulu Museum of Art
The Spencer Museum of Art
Minneapolis Institute of Art
Google maps - the Utsunoya-toge Pass with a Meiji Era tunnel to avoid the hazards of the old road In Hokusai and Hiroshige: Great Japanese Prints from the James A. Michener Collection, Honolulu Academy of Arts on page 185 it says: "About 4½ miles from Mariko, the topography changes drastically, and travelers again reach a treacherous place, the Utsu Pass - third in difficulty after the Hakone and Satta Passes."
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This is number 22 in the series. Curatorial notes at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on one of Hiroshige's renditions of this stop say: "...the mountain pass at Okabe, the twenty-second station on the road in the mountains west of Suruga Bay..." This scene is reminiscent of "...an episode from Chapter 9 in the poetic classic Tales of Ise."
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In Tokaido Landscapes: The Path from Hiroshige to Contemporary Artists, 2011, #22, p. 34, speaking of the original Hiroshige print it says in a text by Sasaki Moritoshi: "The Utsunoya Pass was well known from an episode in the ancient Ise Monogatari (Tales of Ise); in the late Edo period, the Tōkaidō did not cross that exact spot but the entire area was known as Mount Utsu. A woodman carrying firewood appears at the top of the slope, followed by two men with baskets on their backs. From the rear to the foreground, the figures increase in size, until the lower half of the last figure is truncated, in conveying the sense of these people crossing the pass in succession."
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Utsunoya Pass is at 279 meters (about 915') and connects the villages of Mariko and Okabe.
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Muneshige Narazaki in Masterworks of Ukiyo-e: Hiroshige, the 53 Stations of the Tōkaidō (p. 51) noted: "Woodcutters make their way through a narrow pass in the Utsu valley, which has figured prominently in Japanese literature. The unknown author of "The Tales of Ise" (early Heian period) writes of it: "The path before me was dark and narrow; everywhere were vines and maple trees. I felt terribly lonely, and was wondering what frightful thing might befall me there when just then I met a wandering monk." Legend has it that in ancient days there stood on this path a sotoba (a wooden tablet with sacred words written on it and customarily set up beside a grave); passing travelers used to write verses on this sotoba. It is obviously a scene that made a dramatic appeal to the artist."
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Illustrated in a small color reproduction in Kunisada's Tokaido: Riddles in Japanese Woodblock Prints by Andreas Marks, Hotei Publishing, 2013, page 67, T24-22.
Sanoya Kihei (佐野屋喜兵衛) (publisher)
landscape prints (fūkeiga 風景画) (author)