Night view Saruwaka Street from the series One Hundred Famous Views of Edo

In 1832, Utagawa Hiroshige received an invitation to join an official procession to deliver gifts from his hometown, Edo, to the emperor in Kyoto. Traveling along the Tōkaidō route that linked the two capitals, Hiroshige sketched every village along the way. An example of this is Night View at Saruwaka, which highlights two Western artistic techniques that the artist adopted: the use of perspective and shadows. In Night View, Hiroshige’s figures cast shadows as they travel a street that sharply recedes into the distance. A long, diagonal perspective of the city street at night places the city quarter in the distance and a set of theaters closer, to the right of Saruwaka-machi.