A courtesan of the Yoshiwara pleasure quarter sits looking out from a window on the upper-storey of a teahouse whilst workmen are busy repairing the building's roof above. The woman looks out over the Sumida river, to the Embankment of Japan (Nihon-tsutsumi), the path that lead patrons of the Yoshiwara from the river along rice fields to the pleasure quarter.

For this work, Hokusai has deliberately transferred the location of the original poem by the poet Ise from the Naniwa Inlet (the ancient name for the region around Osaka), to Edo and it's famous pleasure quarters.

The poem has been translated by Joshua Mostow:
Naniwagata
mijikaki ashi no
fushi no ma no
awade kono yo o
sugushite yo to ya

To go through this life, not meeting
for even as short a time as the space
between two nodes of a reed
in Naniwa inlet --
is that what you are telling me?

For a similar impression in the collection The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, accession no. 11.17540, go to: MFA, Hokusai Poet Ise