On the Royal Road: with Hiroshige on the Tōkaidō

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 terminu...