During Hokusai’s long career he constantly experimented with styles, explored new subjects and created new genres. In 1779, at the age of nineteen, he entered the prestigious Katsukawa School studio and for the next fourteen years, using the name Shunrō, produced illustrations for novels; European perspective–style prints; poetry album prints; and single-sheet kabuki portraits in the Katsukawa studio’s style.

After leaving the Katsukawa School in 1793 Hokusai worked as an independent artist under the names
Sori and Kakō. His prints from this time capture intimate and poignant interactions between people set in the natural environment. In many of these works we see the emergence of Mt Fuji as an ever-present backdrop, marking the beginning of Hokusai’s personal obsession with the sacred mountain.

During the early nineteenth century Hokusai’s fascination with European imagery led him to produce woodblock prints that imitated European aesthetics and a wide variety of works depicting human relationships, social situations and popular stories. Throughout this long period of artistic development, Hokusai refined an ability to instil his human figures, animals and landscapes with a realism and personality that brought them to life and set him on a trajectory to produce his groundbreaking series of the 1830s.

Throughout Japanese history, Mt Fuji has inspired a sense of spiritual awe. The 3776-metre volcano rises from sea level in one monumental sweeping curve to the highest peak found in Japan. On a clear day, Mt Fuji was visible from vantage points in almost all neighbourhoods of the capital city of Edo, and its dramatic shape and changing seasonal beauty was foremost in the imagination of painters, poets and ordinary citizens throughout Japan.

It was this profound public sentiment, as well as the popularisation of domestic travel in nineteenth-century Japan, that informed publisher Nishimuraya Yohachi (Eijudō) and Hokusai’s Thirty-six Views of Mt Fuji series, 1830–34, which contains many of Hokusai’s most famous and internationally recognised images. Completed in his early seventies, during the peak of his career, the series depicts Mt Fuji in different seasons and weather conditions from different viewpoints and distances. In these prints human activity in rural and city settings is juxtaposed with the dramatic and all-encompassing symbol of nature, Mt Fuji. More than simple pictorial views, the Thirty-six Views of Mt Fuji display Hokusai’s genius at not only composing landscapes but also making acute social observations.

This dynamic series contains some of Hokusai’s most mesmerising design concepts. Encouraged by the groundbreaking results he achieved in works such as The great wave off Kanagawa, Hokusai took the theme of depicting moving water to a new and unprecedented level. A Tour to the Waterfalls in Various Provinces was the first series on the theme of waterfalls published in Japan.

Hokusai selected eight waterfalls located between Nikkō Tōshōgu, approximately 100 kilometres north of Edo, and the mountains of Yoshino, near the ancient capital of Nara, approximately 500 kilometres west of Edo. To gain maximum effect and allow the waterfalls to fill the entire sheet, Hokusai executed the prints in vertical format.

The series extended his investigation into methods to compose a landscape print, and emphasised the importance of waterfalls in Japanese religious belief and practice. In Japan, waterfalls are not only scenic attractions but also, in most cases, locations closely related to Shinto nature worship and Buddhist ideology. Images of these natural phenomena were more than pictures of beautiful places; they were considered spiritual iconography. As the series title indicates, the collecting of such images could be seen as symbolising something akin to making a spiritual pilgrimage to the actual waterfalls.

This group of eleven prints depicts the unique bridges a traveller might experience when visiting the major cities of Edo or Osaka; the picturesque surrounding areas of Kyoto; when travelling the famed Tōkaidō Road; while visiting the distant feudal domains of Iwakuni or Echizen; or when wandering through the remote mountainous regions of central Honshu.

Unlike works in Thirty-six Views of Mt Fuji series, such as The great wave off Kanagawa, or Hokusai’s waterfall prints, these images do not focus so much on dynamic compositions but instead poetically illustrate the locations and the humanity that surrounds bridges, and document the design of the bridges themselves. In contrast to the Mt Fuji series, many of the locations were in faraway regions and only known to the people of Edo through historical accounts and contemporary tales of travel.

This allowed Hokusai the freedom to create stories and settings that were a combination of reality, historical literature and his personal imagination. While many of the bridges depicted disappeared long ago, some even before Hokusai’s time, the Togetsu Bridge, the Kintai Bridge and the Drum Bridge have all been reconstructed and can still be experienced in settings similar to those shown in Hokusai’s scenes.

A popular theme in storytelling, folk traditions, religion and the performing arts throughout Japanese history is a belief in ghosts, demons and the supernatural. During the Edo period a new form of theatre named kabuki often featured performances concerning love, betrayal, murder and ghostly reprisals based on real events that had become urban folklore and intrigued the scandal-loving middle classes. It is on these popular stories that Hokusai based his gruesome One Hundred Ghost Stories series of prints, c. 1831.

A favourite story-telling parlour game of the Edo period was Hyaku Monogatari Kaidankai (One Hundred Ghostly Stories Get-together). Participants would gather after dark in a room lit by 100 lamps. As each story was completed, one lamp was blown out. As the room gradually darkened, the participants’ imaginations thrilled with expectation, and when the final tale was completed and the final lamp extinguished it was said a supernatural phenomenon would occur.

Due to their popularity, ghost stories have been collected and published as books, ukiyo-e prints, children’s card games and, from the twentieth century, as manga comic books, cartoon series, television dramas and films. Hokusai’s five ghost story prints remain some of the most evocative and spinechilling examples in this unique genre of Japanese art.

This set of three poetic landscape prints shows scenes immediately recognisable, at the time of their creation, to the print-buying populace of Japan: the Sumida River in Edo; the Yodo River in Japan’s other great metropolis, Osaka; and the hills of Yoshino, near Nara. Within these famous settings, Hokusai has masterfully presented depictions of snow, the moon and flowers. This trio of motifs, known as setsu-getsu-ka, was a favourite in Chinese Tang dynasty poetry, which Hokusai and the cultivated merchant classes of Edo-period Japan were passionately fond of.

Together, setsu-getsu-ka represent the four seasons: snow indicating winter; the moon representing autumn; and flowers for either spring or summer. Setsu-getsu-ka could also represent three different kinds of white: bluish white for winter, signifying snow; a warmer white for autumn, representing the harvest moon; and a pinkish white for spring and summer, when the favoured flower was cherry blossom. These motifs were a popular theme in ukiyo-e, and as well as in landscapes, and were often referenced in prints of beautiful women or kabuki scenes.

Since the Heian period (794–1185), Japanese nobles and the samurai classes have admired Chinese literature and poetry. The Edo period (1600–1868) ushered in more than 260 years of peace and stability that gave rise to a financially empowered merchant class with a broad appreciation of the arts. A knowledge of Chinese and Japanese literature was pursued and enjoyed by this new culturally informed society and led to the publication of books and prints on these themes.

These prints, executed in the nagaban (narrow vertical print) format, resemble the shape of a small picture scroll. Rather than depicting landscapes based on actual locations, for this series Hokusai returned to his passion for literary, mythological and historical subjects and employed his compositional knowledge of nanga (Chinese Southern School painting), where depth is created by the use of a diagonally zigzagging structure of angles.

The series features historically acclaimed poets portrayed in imagined scenes inspired by their poems, or in real-life episodes for which they had become famous. Japanese and Chinese poets are featured in their respective countries, with the exception of the Japanese poet Abe no Nakamaro, depicted in China, and the Chinese poet Bai Juyi, shown visiting Japan.

The Ryūkyū Kingdom ruled an archipelago that stretched from just south of Japan’s southernmost island, Kyushu, to the Sakishima Islands near Taiwan. The kingdom played a key role in maritime trade between South-East Asia, China, Korea and Japan, maintaining a semi-independent status by cultivating diplomatic relations with China from the fourteenth century onwards, and pledging itself as a vassal state of the Satsuma Domain of Japan in the seventeenth century.

In the tenth month of 1832 a delegation of more than two hundred members from the Ryūkyū Kingdom visited Edo. The occasion was celebrated with a parade of exotically dressed officials, attendants and musicians through the streets of the city, which led to a surge of public interest in the mysterious southern kingdom. In response, Hokusai and his publishers conceived a series of eight prints introducing the Ryūkyū islands. Hokusai never visited the islands, and based his compositions on a group of simple black-and-white illustrations published the previous year in An Encyclopaedia of the Ryūkyū Kingdom. These images were copied from a series of eight scenic sites, accompanied by poems inspired by Ryūkyū port city of Naha, in the Chinese book Brief History of the Ryūkyū Kingdom by Zhou Huang (1757).

Throughout Hokusai’s career, birds and flowering plants appeared in his prints, poetry albums and paintings as subtle indicators of the seasons and coded messages to suggest emotions. The depictions of flowering plants that Hokusai made until his seventies follow the classical Chinese traditions of Song dynasty paintings. However, during the early 1830s he released two series of kachō-e (pictures of birds and flowers) that reinterpreted this 800-year-old tradition, using the powerful graphic qualities and translucent pigments of Japanese ukiyo-e printmaking to yield outstanding results.

Prints in the first series, known as Large Flowers, are in the horizontal oban (large sheet) format. In general, the flowers are positioned centrally and include one bird or insect, with Hokusai’s signature being the only inscription. The second series of prints, known as Small Flowers, are in the more intimate chuban (half sheet) format and match species of flowers with birds in seasonal settings. The names of the birds and flowers are inscribed on each sheet, and Japanese or Chinese poems enhance the contemplative settings. Hokusai’s great ability to capture animals’ movement enabled him to illustrate many of the birds swooping and darting in flight – a skill unrivalled by other Japanese artists.

This last major series of prints created by Hokusai is based on Japan’s best known anthology of poems, the Ogura Hyakunin Isshu, compiled by the nobleman and poet Fujiwara no Teika in 1235. Visual interpretations of poems from the Ogura Hyakunin Isshu had traditionally been formalised depictions of court life, or portraits of the poets themselves dressed in classical costume. Hokusai, however, had egalitarian ideals and filled many of his scenes with ordinary people engaging in daily chores and rejoicing in the simple pleasures of life.

Hokusai was a highly literate man, and while enjoying the classical interpretation of these verses must also have relished their phonetic potential for double meanings. To explain these new interpretations, he invented an unlikely visual orator, ‘The nurse’ – a wet nurse, or surrogate mother for an infant. While the formal poem appears in the patterned cartouche in the upper right of each print, the ever-caring surrogate mother (perhaps representing Hokusai himself) visually retells the poem not within the strict conventions of ancient Japan but with the sincerity and loving maternal care of a wet nurse who is interpreting the verses to us – children of the modern age.

The fifteen volumes of Hokusai’s Manga, comprising more than 800 pages and almost 4000 motifs, are a veritable visual encyclopedia of the daily life and flourishing culture of Edo-period Japan. The artist’s whimsical and socially astute observations of nature, inventions, architecture, historical figures and mythology are both entertaining and culturally enlightening.

In 1814 the first volume of Denshin Kaishu: Hokusai Manga (Education of Beginners through the Spirit of Things: Random Sketches by Hokusai) was published. Its title suggests that the book was originally intended as a painting manual for artists wanting to gain knowledge of Hokusai’s spontaneity and genius. However, the Manga’s comical nature had great appeal to the general public. Nine additional volumes were published between 1815 and 1819, and further volumes were created in c. 1833, 1834 and 1849, with two final editions produced posthumously – in c. 1850 and 1878.

The Hokusai Manga provide an insight into the artist’s fascination with the more unusual and bizarre fringes of society. Depictions of contortionists, magic tricks, ghosts, monsters, funny faces and dance instructions, a man submerged under water in a large glass bottle and drunken party games reveal an eccentric side of the artist.

Hokusai’s three-volume One Hundred Views of Mt Fuji, published in 1834, 1835 and c. 1839, respectively, is acknowledged as his most complete homage to any one subject, and is one of the great masterpieces in the history of book illustration. These volumes are different from his single-sheet colour prints of Mt Fuji, which were simpler line compositions with washes of colour, and demonstrate Hokusai’s understanding that the success of monochrome book illustration relied on the creative use of line, mark- making and dramatic composition.

Throughout One Hundred Views of Mt Fuji, Hokusai astounds the viewer with his imagination. The presence of Mt Fuji, with its conical shape and sweeping lines, never appears repetitious. At times it is viewed through swaying willow trees, a bamboo grove, cherry blossoms in full bloom, from a scholar’s circular window and through the arches of a bridge; at other times it appears under a waterfall, as a distorted reflection in a lake, through the spherical hoops of an astronomer’s device and even projected through a pinhole in the wall onto a paper sliding screen.

Released in 1845, The Life of Shakyamuni is an interpretation of the life of the historical Buddha (Shakyamuni), illustrated by Hokusai and written by Yamada Isai. The six-volume publication consists of fifty-five episodes and thirty-five illustrations and tells the story of Buddha, from his birth in the kingdom of Kapilavastu to the return of his cremated ashes there on the back of a huge white elephant.

Produced when he was eighty-five years old, The Life of Shakyamuni was one of Hokusai’s last and most elaborately illustrated book projects. In these volumes we see lavish depictions of ornate architecture and exotic landscapes, the physicality and facial expressions of eccentric characters, and terrifying mythical beasts. However, it is Hokusai’s masterful skills in composition and pictorial design that make these books so astounding.

Unconventionally, he employed both vertical and horizontal double-page formats to enhance each scene’s visual impact. In many works there is a dense overall effect of radiating, swerving or spiralling white lines that fill the narrative with a refined visual tension not usually found in depictions of Shakyamuni’s life. As Hokusai approached his final years, this last great series of illustrated books came as a final religious offering from the devout Buddhist.