Tenryu River at Mitsuke

The ferry in the foreground enters diagonally and large from the lower right, with its bow run up on the sandbar. On the boat a boatman stands holding a pole while another sits looking toward the far bank. The lines of the two boats flow toward the upper left, leading the viewer's eye into the depths of the river. The pole stretches diagonally nearly to the top edge of the picture, adding a sharp line to the quiet water surface.

Around here the Tenryu River divides into two streams, the eastern one called the Great Tenryu and the western one the Little Tenryu. According to the Tokyo Fuji Art Museum's commentary, the near one is the Little Tenryu and the far one the Great Tenryu. Beyond the sandbar, a daimyo procession has split among several boats and begun to cross the Great Tenryu. The boatmen in the foreground have finished a job and are watching the procession cross.

The forest on the far bank is expressed with bokashi (a printing technique of gradually lightening the color) so that it seems to melt into the mist. Crossing a large river was one of the hardships of Tokaido travel, and in Utagawa Hiroshige's Hoeido edition, ferry scenes are also drawn at the Rokugo River at Kawasaki and at Imagire at Arai. Fine dots are printed on the sand of the sandbar, and together with the indigo gradation at the water's edge, they convey the breadth of the shallows.