1849
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Nissaka: The Night-Weeping Stone at Sayo no Nakayama, from the series The Fifty-Three Stations of the Tōkaidō is a 1849 by Utagawa Hiroshige, a Romanticism work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
A dark mountain road winds past a mossy boulder. Travelers in straw hats trudge by lantern-light. The boulder glows faintly, as if wet. This print shows one stop on the Tōkaidō road. The boulder is said to weep at night, marking the spot where bandits killed a pregnant woman long ago. Hiroshige turns a ghost story into a quiet, moonlit scene. If you like this, look up *subject: japan, edo period (1615–1868)*.
This print is an image of a mountain pass in Nissaka, one of the stops along the Tōkaidō, a road running from Kyoto to Edo (present-day Tokyo). This scene alludes to a legend in which bandits murdered a pregnant woman on that stretch of road, and her blood fell upon a stone. Shown in the foreground, the stone is said to contain the woman’s spirit, and so it weeps each night. In some versions of the story, the stone’s cry alerts a passing monk (really the disguised bodhisattva Kannon) to the presence of her infant, who survived the attack. The monk takes the child from the deceased mother’s…
This print belongs to a series known colloquially as the “Formal Script Tōkaidō” because of the style of text in which the name of the series is printed.
Read the full account in the museum source.
Utagawa Hiroshige (歌川 広重) or Andō Hiroshige (安藤 広重), born Andō Tokutarō (安藤 徳太郎; 1797 – 12 October 1858), was a Japanese ukiyo-e artist, considered the last great master of that tradition.
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