By the time he reached sixty, Hokusai had been drawing for almost fifty-five years, having started at the age of six, as he himself declared. Over the course of four decades as a professional artist, he adopted and discarded more than ten different ‘art names’. While training in the studio of the popular print artist Katsukawa Shunshō he signed his work ‘Shunrō’. He began using ‘Hokusai’ (North Studio), his most famous art name, in about 1798, when he was thirty-nine. He used the art name ‘litsu’ (One Again) from the age of sixty-one. Aged seventy-five, he entered deep old age with the art names ‘Manji’ (Everything) and ‘Gakyō Rōjin’ (Old Man Crazy to Paint). Each name reflected a significant life event, artistic goal or spiritual belief. Experimenting with style and self in this way prepared Hokusai in the final three decades of his life, after turning sixty-one, to create not only the printed masterpieces with which he is identified the world over, but also an extraordinary succession of paintings.

Hokusai’s early curiosity was stimulated by growing up in the Honjo district on the far bank of the Sumida River, which flowed through the flat lands of Edo (present-day Tokyo), east of the shogun’s castle – a neighbourhood of artisans, craftspeople and other working classes. He worked as a delivery boy for a rental bookshop in his youth, and was thus able to study how word and image combined. In his mid-teens he was apprenticed to a woodblock cutter, making some of the blocks for a book on the pleasure quarters when he was only sixteen. Then, in about 1778, he became a pupil of Katsukawa Shunshō (died 1792), a leading artist of the floating world school of art (ukiyo-e), which celebrated the hedonistic pleasures of the city. He was known particularly for his prints of kabuki actors. Under Shunshō, Hokusai took on the name Shunrō. Like his master, he focused on the theatre, producing actor prints in the characteristic manner of his school. Hokusai, though, was soon studying other traditions – a kind of artistic betrayal that prompted Hokusai’s expulsion from the school. This turn of events inspired Hokusai to find his own path and forge his own style. His determination was underpinned by his devotion to Bodhisattva Myōken, a Buddhist deity associated with the North Star and the constellation of the Big Dipper, whose temple at Yanagishima was much visited by artists and writers, and on whose power Hokusai continued to draw over the next few decades.

For some five years from 1794, Hokusai used the name Sōri, which announced his allegiance to the decorative, so-called ‘Rinpa’ style inaugurated in the early 1600s by Tawaraya Sōtatsu (about 1570 – about 1640) and perfected by Ogata Kōrin (1658–1716). His work varied widely, however: he studied various Japanese and Chinese painting styles, as well as recently introduced European techniques. Much of his livelihood, such as it was, came from his increasing involvement in literary and cultural circles, for whom he produced paintings, privately commissioned albums, and prints (surimono) illustrating ‘crazy verse’ (kyōka) and announcing special events or performances. Hokusai’s literary connections also led to a long series of collaborations with the leading authors and publishers of his day to create illustrated books.

By 1798, Hokusai’s growing confidence was clear. He used the seal ‘Shizōka’ (‘Creation is my master’), announcing his determination to serve ‘creation’, and in the summer he declared his artistic independence, taking on two new names: Hokusai, the one by which he is best known today, and Tokimasa. Both underlined his dedication to the North Star. During the next decade he also frequently prefaced his signature with ‘Gakyōjin’ (‘Man crazy to paint’). Hokusai’s work between 1800 and 1810 was increasingly sought after, evident in the variety and quality of his commissions, from individual scroll paintings of beautiful women (bijin-ga) to intensive work for commercial publishers, illustrating the popular adventure stories of Kyokutei (Takizawa) Bakin (1767–1848). Artistically, he was rapidly evolving towards a distinctive style and a wide range of thematic preoccupations.

By the 1810s, Hokusai had synthesized his encyclopaedic command of artistic styles into his own, highly individual way of depicting the world and its people. The monumental figures of Tametomo and the islanders, set against an animated landscape, prefigure his way of brush drawing laid out in the serial picture book Hokusai’s Sketches (Hokusai manga) from the middle of the decade, with examples ranging from divine beings and human types, to animal species, plant forms and natural features. Hokusai was interested in the common people and natural phenomena of this world, but he also saw how they connected easily to a world of mythic heroes and divine forces. He acknowledged the presence of the divine with a new name, ‘Taito’ (‘Receiving the Big Dipper’), which reaffirmed his devotion to the polar constellation and his faith in Myōken, as he entered his fifties. By the end of that decade of his life, from the age of sixty-one, he was ready to ‘become one’ (‘Iitsu’) with the world and to be reborn (‘one again’) as an artist.

By the Edo period (1615–1868), Mt Fuji was an object of popular religious devotion, laying the foundation for its role as a national icon in modern times. It had also long been depicted by artists. However, Hokusai’s interest differed from that of his predecessors and his achievement transcended theirs. He depicted the iconic mountain a number of times before he turned fifty but, after he reached sixty, Fuji began to take centre stage. The series that became Thirty-six Views of Mt Fuji synthesized all that Hokusai had learned up to that point, including techniques and materials he had taken from recent European imports.

A few years later, around 1834, Hokusai declared a more personal identification with the mountain. Changing his name to ‘Manji’ (‘ten thousand things’, ‘everything’), he began to use a stylized image of Fuji on a new seal. One of the first works bearing both was his greatest illustrated book, One Hundred Views of Mt Fuji. Thirty-six Views placed the mountain as the stable centre of a teeming human landscape, but One Hundred Views suggested that its authority transcended the concerns of this world. The artist returned once more to the mountain in his final years, believing it to have life-prolonging powers.

Although Hokusai focused on Fuji in his seventies and early eighties, he had been drawn to water, in all its forms, throughout his life. The East Asian landscape had long been defined in terms of mountains and rivers, but Hokusai may have been the first to explore fully the way a river animated a city, the meeting of sea and land, and the inherent power and mystery of rivers and the ocean itself.

Hokusai’s depiction of the ocean, particularly of waves, became ever more dynamic and animated over time. ‘The Great Wave’ may be his most famous depiction of the subject, but it is only one example of his exploration of the relationship between sea, land and sky. By the end of his life, Hokusai was focusing on the sea alone. In the 1840s, he combined waves and whirlpools, showing how the ocean itself brought together the fury of waves and the stillness he had identified in Fuji, so providing a portal to another world, as shown in his ceiling panels for the Kanmachi festival float.

Hokusai was a meticulous observer of the social and natural worlds. He started as an artist of the floating world school of art (ukiyo-e), which celebrated the hedonistic pleasures of the city. He continued to depict figure subjects throughout his career but by the time he turned sixty, they were just part of an encyclopaedic account of the visible world. Hokusai worked tirelessly to capture what he called the ‘form of things’: physiological differences and affective states; the skilled motions of a craftsman or the coordination of labour; botanical and zoological minutiae; and the way in which land, light and water combine. A subject or composition that had appeared in one medium might well reappear in another, travelling from brush drawing manuals to prints, and vice versa.

These pictures were often the result of close observation but Hokusai’s ambition was not merely realistic depiction. First, he was both drawing on and breaking with long pictorial traditions of bird-and-flower painting and of ‘famous places’ wherein nature was overwritten with literary reference and cultural meaning. He also looked to his own, immediate artistic predecessors, who provided models for compositions that could be used to reveal the beauty and wonder of this world.

In addition, Hokusai lived at a time when horizons were generally local (travel was possible only on foot or by horse), but Hokusai did not need to see something to depict it. He had access to a wealth of information and illustrations about life in the Japanese archipelago and beyond. In any case, he was not trying to produce a simple documentary record. A ‘tour’ of famous waterfalls could include both places he knew well and imaginative evocations of famous but inaccessible places he may never have visited.

Finally, Hokusai’s designs were less about observed phenomena than making his subjects speak a larger truth about the connectedness of things – people in groups, animal and vegetable, the physical and the immaterial, micro and macro – and therefore, ultimately, the human and the divine. Hokusai’s brush sought to provide a way for the viewer to see the mystery in the everyday, to enter communion with, for example, a cormorant, and thereby a world beyond the surface of things.

Hokusai moved easily between the worlds of observation and imagination. His compressed view of the Tōkaidō highway (1818), his vision of one hundred Japanese bridges (1823), and his topographically accurate map of China (1840) blur the distinction between the world as it is and a world of make-believe.

China was everywhere in Tokugawa Japan. It had provided the painting medium within which Hokusai worked, the stylistic foundations on which he built, and many of the subjects and themes that he used to capture an audience. Most popular were the 108 bandits of Outlaws of the Marsh, a serialized novel that appeared in ninety-one printed volumes (1805–1830s). But China also provided literary figures and poetic models, as well as deities such as Zhong Kui (Shōki) to help ward off the perils of the present. Japan had its own indigenous canon, of course, of both literary accomplishment and military achievement. The landscape was known through its historical associations, as imagined over the centuries in literature and art. But Japan took its place within a Sinocentric paradigm. Great poets of the past could easily be transplanted – a Japanese poet depicted in China and a Chinese poet in Japan.

Nowhere was more real, ultimately, than the unseen worlds of fantasy and faith. Hokusai conjured demons that had long haunted the Japanese imagination but were rarely as effectively depicted. He also provided powerful talismans with which to ward off the life-threatening diseases that swept through his city at regular intervals. Hokusai’s art, though, was not simply calibrated to the market but was anchored in belief. His ambition and achievement were underpinned by devotion to the North Star and his belief in Nichiren Buddhism. At times, his depictions of monk Nichiren and of the historical Buddha demonstrated the extraordinary forces to which such faith provided access. At others, the Buddha seems almost human and approachable, like other figures with whom we might identify . As he grew older, Hokusai seems to have formed an ever closer connection to this world of supernatural authority – which prompted both fearful awe and quiet communion – and to have felt ever more keenly a need to depict it.

Hokusai rarely worked alone. His achievement was rooted in his need to learn from and work with others. It was sustained by the liberality with which he passed on what he had learned. Art was not exclusive, but a way of connecting to the world, open to all.

In part, this was simply how things were done at the time. An artist was apprenticed to a teacher in a studio. In time he would acquire his own students, with whom he produced joint works and to whom he passed on his name. Woodblock printing required a well-practised quartet – publisher, artist, block cutter and printer. Artists like Hokusai also worked with craftspeople, providing designs for a variety of objects. Hokusai was unusual in the range of his collaboration, especially with writers, and the frequency with which he distributed names and seals among his students, though both were common practice.

By sixty, he had begun to pull back from the social world and the public painting exploits that had characterized his younger days. Collaboration continued, not least for printed work. Hokusai remained in demand from publishers, and he knew which cutters he wanted to transfer his designs to the blocks. He worked closely with his own daughter Eijo (art name Ōi, about 1800 – after 1857), whose helping hand can perhaps be detected in certain works, among them a wellknown pair of paintings of chrysanthemums. Hokusai’s reputation and network also allowed him to travel – leaving behind the demands of life in Edo – and generated commissions, for which he produced some of his most extraordinary paintings.

Hokusai was distinctive in his determination to share his technique and vision with the world. Many contemporary artists produced albums, sometimes printed, to serve as models for students and primers of style. Hokusai’s equivalents were more comprehensive and detailed, not just encouraging students to copy, but also showing them how they could master different styles and so produce their own account of the world. In one of his last books, Picture Book: Essence of Colouring, he gave step-by-step instructions on how to prepare and apply pigments. Underpinning Hokusai’s work and thought was the desire expressed in the subtitle for a number of his teaching manuals, denshin kaishu, ‘to convey the spirit’.

Numbers were vital for Hokusai. In 1820, at the age of sixty-one, the beginning of his second sexagenary cycle, he assumed a new art name that announced his turning ‘one again’. He usually combined it with a seal, Katsushika, which referred to the county in which he had been born. Fourteen years later, with the publication of One Hundred Views of Mt Fuji, he changed again. His new seal, incorporating Mt Fuji, proclaimed an identification with the mountain, while the new name, Manji, declared his affiliation to ‘ten thousand things’, or, ‘everything’. In a postscript to that book, Hokusai also announced his determination to live long enough, at one hundred, to achieve a ‘divine state’ in his art, so that at one hundred and ten ‘every dot and every stroke will be as though alive’. In 1847, aged eighty-eight, the desire became even more urgent and Hokusai began exclusively using ‘hyaku’, the character for one hundred, in a large new seal. He died just two years later. But the last paintings, stamped with this seal, are witness to both ambition and accomplishment. They are an extraordinary final outpouring and summation of a life lived in devotion to the power of art to connect to the world.

Hokusai’s art was founded on meticulous, patient observation, such as that depicted in his painting of the classical Chinese poet Li Bo (AD 701–762). His encyclopedic command of style and technique, honed over six decades, gave Hokusai the freedom to reveal new truths: how light brings to life a casual heap of fans; how ducks, leaves and weeds move in flowing water; or a cuckoo rides the wind; and how Fuji, glimpsed through pines, compels rapt attention.

Hokusai did not remain an impartial observer, however. Art gave him a way to imagine himself into the world, to identify with his subjects – and so, like the philosopher Zhuang Zhou (4th century BC), to question the very boundary between ‘dream’ and ‘reality’. Sometimes his late paintings encourage quiet contemplation. Sometimes they crackle with energy. And sometimes they inspire awe and ecstasy, connecting the human world to the divine. Hokusai did not stay Hokusai, therefore. He could project himself into the underwhelming figure of a cormorant, ignoring his unprepossessing surroundings to contemplate the wider world. He could feel like a tiger, snarling into pouring rain. Or, most protean of all, he could repeatedly become a dragon, coiling up out of a storm and ascending above Mt Fuji.