Pilgrimage to the Torinomachi Festival across the Ricefields of Asakusa, from the series One Hundred Famous Views of Edo

The white cat on the windowsill sits in a room of the Yoshiwara, Edo's licensed pleasure quarter, and in the Metropolitan Museum's reading the woman who lives there has only just stepped out. Hiroshige keeps her out of the picture and shows what she left behind, a set of hairpins shaped like tiny bamboo rakes and, beside them, a packet of tissue paper.

The rakes explain the view. Through the lattice, lines of people cross the ricefields of Asakusa to the Ōtori shrine for the Torinomachi festival, held on the days of the rooster in the 11th month, where stalls sold decorated bamboo rakes as charms for raking in good fortune. The Met suggests the hairpins were a client's present from the festival. The print is dated to the 11th month of 1857, festival season itself, and far beyond the fields and the procession rises Mount Fuji.