By the 1800s, when the artists Katsushika Hokusai and Utagawa Hiroshige lived and worked, commoners enjoyed the numerous amenities of Edo (Tokyo), the world's largest city (pop. ca. 800,000). They launched businesses, perfected crafts, gained leisure time and literacy, traveled a coherent system of safe roads, and enjoyed art, poetry, a seemingly limitless taste for novelty, and the income to indulge them.

Ukiyo-e prints - 'pictures of the floating world' - reflect the lives of the Edo commoners. In Hokusai's and Hiroshige's prints, we see the faces of this new middle class, both the excitement and drudgery of their daily activities, and favorite views of the landmarks and natural wonders they beheld.

Most of the 200 ukiyo-e prints in this book (100 by Hokusai, 100 by Hiroshige) are from the distinguished James A. Michener Collection of the Honolulu Academy of Arts.

Included in their entirety are Hokusai's series, Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, and Hiroshige's series, Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido Road, along with selections from their other major series.