OVER LAKE CAYUGA, A SHEEN of blackness falls away to reveal a sun-tipped mountain capped in gold with red light spilling down its sides. It reminds me of a famous woodblock print, South Wind, Clear Dawn (popularly known as Red Mount Fuji at Dawn) by the eccentric Japanese print designer and painter Katsushika Hokusai, born in Tokyo in 1760. Hokusai changed his residence a hundred times, his name thirty-nine times (finally choosing “the old art-crazed man”), yet somehow spent most of his eighty-nine years creating over thirty thousand dramatic and suggestive prints, paintings, and books. From the age of five, he had a mania for sketching things, “yet of all I drew prior to the age of seventy,” he wrote in his autobiography, “there is truly nothing of great note. At the age of seventy-two I finally apprehended something of the true quality of birds, animals, insects, fish and of the vital nature of grasses and trees. Therefore, at eighty I shall have made some progress, at ninety I shall have penetrated even further the deeper meaning of things, at one hundred I shall have become truly marvelous, and at one hundred and ten, each dot, each line shall surely possess a life of its own.”
It was in his seventies that he began the stunning series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, which also includes The Great Wave off Kanagawa, probably the most reproduced print on earth, a scene of turbulent foam-tipped waves of cyan and pale blue clawing at three small fishing boats in which frightened men frantically bend to their oars. In the flat golden sky, billowy clouds promise a placid morning, and a tiny Mount Fuji sits calmly in the background. It’s the foreground that holds all the drama, though I think most people miss the nearly capsized swift boats that carry fresh foodstuffs at dawn to the Tokyo markets from nearby villages. That the mood of the ocean and the sky don’t match—galloping chariots of carnal blue under a fair-weather sky—creates a sinister beauty that alarms the senses at the same time that it reassures the psyche. To the men, the wave is much taller than the volcanic mountain, a perspective that fits. With a faint echo of the fishermen, we’re swept up onto the waves, knowing that at any moment the waves are going to crash. Hokusai created a sister print, minus the fishing boats, in which the grasping waves have been replaced with foam tips breaking into a flock of birds—an altogether cheerier view. But his tsunami-like wave and red mountain are the icons that most foreigners identify with all of Japanese art.
Legend has it that Monet happened on Hokusai’s work during a trip to Amsterdam, in a food shop where cheap paper decorated with Japanese prints was being used to wrap purchases. The engravings caught his eye. That chance encounter with flimsy, disposable sheets of Oriental wrapping paper would change Western art forever and color how we see the world. Monet fell under the spell of Hokusai and began collecting woodblock prints, in time possessing over two hundred and fifty. It was Hokusai’s suite of landscapes, Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, in which the sacred mountain, always on the rim of Tokyo’s awareness, constantly changes while remaining recognizable, that most likely inspired Monet to create his own chromatic series of Mornings on the Seine, Rouen Cathedral, and Water Lilies.
Hokusai belonged to the Edo period in Japan (1615–1868), two centuries of political and social stability, when a fashion of art known as Ukiyo-e (“the floating world”) swept the country. Originally a somber Buddhist word meaning the “transient world,” where suffering is certain and only impermanence reigns, it was retranslated in 1616 in an altogether less gloomy mood to include “the pleasures of the moon, the snow, the cherry blossoms and the maple-leaves, singing songs, drinking wine…and floating….” Its premise: If everything comes to pass, then why not float from one vest-pocket happiness to the next? Its produce: a democratic celebration of the everyday, with zeal and humor, and a passion for visual trivia that’s not at all trivial, but what flickers across consciousness from moment to moment, the raw sensations of being alive. Some of the Edo artists’ work is quirky, obscene, almost caricature: politicos, fisherwomen, courtesans, actors, street life, family dramas. But other work details the fleeting impressions of weather and landscape, something Monet embraced as a confirmation that his vision was timeless and shared by everyone everywhere, whether or not they could express it.
So Monet’s roots reach into Japanese Buddhism, which inspired the floating world movement, which included Hokusai, who inspired Monet to see and paint the fugitive beauty of each moment, which inspires me to limn a skein of dawns. But whereas Hokusai depicted Mount Fuji from dozens of assorted and evocative viewpoints (near to far, emblem to idol), Monet favored one angle on his subjects, which never occupy the background. In Monet’s series paintings everything is foreground, as he traces their fleeting impressions in restless light and weather.
Instead of the traditional scenes of historic epics and tales, aristocrats, or stylized birds and flowers, shoguns, samurais, and geishas, Hokusai drew the rhythms of everyday life for the common man and woman, and brought a touching empathy to the drawings. He introduced the direct observation of nature, in many atmospheric conditions, with a special love for water in motion. Working in all the media of his day, from silkscreen to erotic “pillow” drawings, he also invented the Manga (a series of sketchbooks, in which he depicts the minutiae of daily life), and left unfinished a series of illustrations with poems, One Hundred Poems Explained by the Nurse, in which he updates and sometimes parodies classic Japanese poems.
I know little of Hokusai’s death, or even of his health, except that he had a minor stroke in 1826, which he is said to have “recovered” from, and died twenty-three years later at the age of eighty-nine. That probably happened at dawn, since most heart attacks and strokes do occur at dawn. With supreme modesty, or insecurity, and maybe a little in jest, he exclaimed on his deathbed: “If I had another ten years…five years, even, I could have become a real painter.”