Nissaka: The Night-Weeping Stone at Sayo no Nakayama, from the series The Fifty-Three Stations of the Tōkaidō
Utagawa Hiroshige (Japanese, 1797–1858)
c. 1848–50
Medium
Color woodblock print
Dimensions
22 × 34.7 cm
Classification
Department
Japanese Art
Museum
Cleveland Museum of Art
Credit
The Kelvin Smith Collection, given by Mrs. Kelvin Smith
Accession Number
1985.323
Tags
male
About this artwork
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 pres...