Nissaka: The Night-Weeping Stone at Sayo no Nakayama, from the series The Fifty-Three Stations of the Tōkaidō (c. 1848–50): Art, History and Details

Nissaka: The Night-Weeping Stone at Sayo no Nakayama, from the series The Fifty-Three Stations of the Tōkaidō (c. 1848–50) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Utagawa Hiroshige (Japanese, 1797–1858).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

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 presence of her infant, who survived the attack. The monk takes the child from the deceased mother’s body, and raises it as his own. The child goes on to avenge its mother.

Object facts

• Title: Nissaka: The Night-Weeping Stone at Sayo no Nakayama, from the series The Fifty-Three Stations of the Tōkaidō
• Date: c. 1848–50
• Creator attribution: Utagawa Hiroshige (Japanese, 1797–1858)
• Culture: Japan, Edo period (1615–1868)
• Type: Print
• Technique: Color woodblock print
• Dimensions: Sheet: 22 x 34.7 cm (8 11/16 x 13 11/16 in.)
• Collection: Japanese Art
• Department: Japanese Art
• Accession number: 1985.323

A detail from the museum

This print belongs to a series known colloquially as the “Formal Script Tōkaidō” because of the style of text in which the name of the series is printed.

Collection credit

The Kelvin Smith Collection, given by Mrs. Kelvin Smith

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.