Cats Suggested as the Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō (left sheet of the triptych)

This sheet is the left third of a triptych, and the joke runs across all three. In the late 1840s Kuniyoshi took the 53 post stations of the Tōkaidō, the highway from Edo to Kyoto that Hiroshige's landscape prints had made famous, and turned every station name into a cat pun. He carried the pun into the title too, swapping the word for stations for the counter used for animals, so the series reads as 53 cats.

This sheet covers the end of the road. In the top corner a mother cat sleeps with her kittens, because Miya echoes oya, parent. At Kusatsu a cat warms itself on a kotatsu, a heated table. Ishibe turns into mijime, miserable, and its cat is skin and bone, while Ōtsu becomes jōzu, skilful, for a cat that has caught a mouse. The road ends at Kyō, as Kyoto was called, turned into gyā, the yowl of a cat standing over its prey.