Making waves | 25 May 2017

The end, whenever it came, was always going to be too soon for Katsushika Hokusai. There was still so much to see. So much he had not painted. On his deathbed, Hokusai, attended by his doctor, said a prayer. ‘If heaven will extend my life by ten more years…’. He paused and made a private calculation. ‘If heaven will afford me five more years of life, then I’ll manage to become a true artist.’ He may have been 90, but he wasn’t done yet.

In life, Hokusai (1760–1849) painted dragons, creatures of long life, by the dozen. He has them disappear in puffs of inky smoke, then reappear across the page. He painted the phoenix, bird of resurrection. He painted Mount Fuji, immutable, enduring, outlasting all his fellow painters, calligraphers, woodblock-cutters and sellers of coloured books who scrabbled for a living in Edo, modern Tokyo. They were but cherry blossoms, pink for a season, maple leaves washed away by a current.

He changed his name more than ten times in his long life. In his seventies, he was Manji, which meant ‘ten thousand things’ or ‘everything’. That is what he wanted to paint — everything. The 15 volumes of the Hokusai manga (1814–1878) went some way towards it: a pictorial encyclopedia of everything under the sun: frogs, snakes, samurai, sumo wrestlers, parasols, fish markets, farm ploughs, oceans and tea bowls.

He signed his woodblock series ‘One Hundred Views of Mt Fuji’ (1849): ‘Brush of Manji, old man crazy to paint.’ He does look a bit mad in his 1842 ‘Self-portrait, aged 83’ (see p49) — skinny, stooped, his face wrinkled and puckered as a pickled plum, pointing at something he’s seen in the distance. Something to sketch? He looks as if he’s turning to call to someone, perhaps his daughter Eijo, an artist in her own right, asking her to bring his brush and ink.