Kawanabe Kyōsai (1831–1889), "Fujikawa Station, Mikawa Province" — from the series Shoga Gojūsan Eki (書画五十三駅), 1872

This is an original Meiji-period woodblock print (nishiki-e) by Kawanabe Kyōsai, one of the last great ukiyo-e masters and among the most inventive satirists of 19th-century Japanese art. Trained first under Utagawa Kuniyoshi and later in the formal Kanō school, Kyōsai fused academic draftsmanship with an anarchic sense of humor that got him briefly imprisoned in 1870 for a caricature mocking government officials — the print offered here dates from just two years after his release, signed with the "Kyōsai" (暁斎) name he adopted following that episode.

The sheet belongs to Shoga Gojūsan Eki ("Calligraphy and Pictures for the Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō"), a series that pairs a small, conventionally elegant landscape vignette and kyōka poem in the upper register with a boisterous, satirical genre scene below — a deliberate send-up of the refined "meisho" (famous-place) Tōkaidō prints made famous by Hiroshige a generation earlier. Here the upper panel shows a serene view of Mount Fuji beside a brushed poem; the lower panel, set at the station of Fujikawa in Mikawa Province, depicts a raucous comic scene of a startled woman fending off two leering old men inside an inn, while a grotesque, demon-like crawling figure looks on from the floor — the kind of bawdy, Hizakurige-style travel comedy that Edo- and Meiji-period audiences loved. The series title cartouche, province/station cartouche, and station name ("藤川" / Fujikawa) are printed in red and green panels at the right edge of the sheet, in a layout that directly parodies the cartouche format of the classic Tōkaidō series it is spoofing.