Cats of the Tōkaidō, from Miya to Kyoto – Utagawa Kuniyoshi (c. 1847)

Twenty cats, twenty jokes. Around 1847, Utagawa Kuniyoshi, the great cat lover of Japanese prints, had a brilliant idea: to retrace the fifty-three stations of the Tōkaidō, the road linking Edo to Kyoto, with cats. Next to each red cartouche bearing the name of a station, a cat strikes a pose that echoes a pun on that name, written in small characters beside it.

This sheet covers the end of the journey, from Miya to Kyoto. At Miya, a mother cat curls up with her kittens: miya becomes oya, “parent”. At Kusatsu, a cat dozes on a kotatsu, the heated table covered with a checked quilt. And at Kyoto, the final stop, a tabby cat lets out a “gyā!” with a mouse in its jaws. In between, cats wash, stretch, climb into a basket, squabble over a ball or sleep in a heap, all drawn with a precision that only a true cat owner could achieve.

Kuniyoshi and his cats

Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1797-1861) shared his studio with many cats, and they appear everywhere in his work, from playful parodies to ghost stories like The Ghost Cat and The Cat Witch of Okabe, another Tōkaidō station. This print, published by Ibaya Senzaburō and signed “Ichiyūsai Kuniyoshi, for fun”, is one of his most beloved designs. It also plays on the fame of the Tōkaidō views by Hiroshige, which every buyer of the time knew by heart.

• Artist: Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1797-1861)
• Date: c. 1847
• Publisher: Ibaya Senzaburō
• Technique: woodblock print (ukiyo-e), third sheet of a triptych
• Collection: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
• Theme: cats, Tōkaidō road, Japanese wordplay

The perfect gift for a cat lover, and a joyful piece for a living room, a kitchen or a child’s room. Discover the original Tōkaidō views in our Hiroshige collection.