On the Royal Road: with Hiroshige on the Tokaido

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Long fascinated by Hiroshige’s woodblock prints, and especially the famous Tokaido Road albums, James Bell worked for several years on an extended series of ekphrastic poems inspired by the second of Hiroshige’s albums (1840-42), the famous Kyoka sequence in which each image contains a short comic poem. The sequence contains 56 images - one for each of the 53 stations, or stops, on the route from Edo to Kyoto, plus one for the starting point (Edo’s Nihonbashi Bridge) and two for the terminus in Kyoto, the second of which is the Imperial Palace. This volume reunites James’s wry poems with the images that inspired them, and includes an appendix of five further poems written to images from the first, so-called Great Tokaido album (1833-34), the work that made Hiroshige’s name.

A book for those who love poetry and also those who love art; those who love both will be doubly rewarded.