new, more serious error. However, at the beginning of this year, I had to have his father Yanagawa Shighenobu take him to the Montzu province (a northern province), but he is easily capable of escaping along the way. Until then, I can breathe a little. Here are the reasons that have kept me from coming to thank you for the book by Soga Monogatari (an old book loaned to him). This New Year, I had neither money, nor clothing, and I am only able to feed myself poorly and not seeing my real New Year start until the middle of its second month. In the second month of last year, when Yeibun came to see me, I had already finished two volumes of Suiko (ninety-volume novel started in 1807), but I have not been able to advance any further. In sum, I lost an entire year because of my mischievous grandson and I regret this precious year lost. I have kept your Soga Monogatari for a long time, but I hope that you can leave it with me until the second month when I will come visit you. Another recommendation, send me, as soon as possible, the silk for painting the goddess Daghiniten (the goddess represented mounted on a fox), because time passes as quickly as an arrow and you had asked me to deliver this painting to you in the second month. If the text of Gaden is ready, send it to me when you send me the silk, also send the price for the illustration of the two volumes of Gaden. When you come, do not ask for Hokusai, no one will know how to answer you, ask for the priest who draws and who recently moved into the building owned by Gorobei in the courtyard of the Mei-ô-in Temple, in the middle of the woods (small forest of Asakusa).”
As capricious as all the great artists, Hokusai was not always in good humour and took a malicious pleasure in being disagreeable towards people who did not show him the deference he thought was due to him or who were, quite simply, unpleasant, as these anecdotes show.
Onoye Baïkô, a great actor of the time, recognised Hokusai’s very particular talent for inventing ghosts, and asked the painter to use his imagination to draw a being from another world to serve as a representation of a character on a theatrical set. The actor invited the painter to come see him, which Hokusai avoided doing. The actor then decided to visit him. He found the workshop so dirty that he did not dare sit on the ground. He had his travelling blanket brought, upon which he greeted Hokusai. The painter, offended, did not turn around, continuing to paint and the illustrious Baïkô, unhappy, left. But he wanted his drawing so much that he had the ‘weakness’ to excuse himself to Hokusai to obtain it. At the same time, Hokusai received a visit from a supplier to the shogun, who came to ask him for a drawing. It is not clear what displeased Hokusai, but we do know, however, that the painter took some lice from his robe and roughly threw them on the visitor, saying that because he was very busy, he was not available. The visitor resigned himself to waiting and obtained the drawing he wanted. But this latter had barely left when Hokusai, running after him, yelled at him in a jeering voice: “Do not forget, if people ask you how my studio is, to tell them that it is very beautiful! Very clean!”
The same fantasy is expressed in his work. In 1804, Hokusai completed, in the form of a public improvisation, a large format painting of a Darma. This event made great waves, and piqued the curiosity of the Tokugawa shogun, who had wanted to see the master work, even though under the Tokugawa, and to this day, no commoner could present himself before the shogun. Thus, one autumn day, upon returning from a hunt with his falcon, the shogun had Hokusai summoned and entertained himself by watching the painter execute his drawings. Suddenly, Hokusai, covering half of an immense piece of paper with indigo, made roosters, after plunging their feet into purple ink, run across it. The prince, surprised, had the illusion of seeing the Tatsuta River with its rapids sweeping up purple momiji leaves in its waters.
Women with a Telescope, excerpt from the series The Seven Bad Habits (Fūryū nakute nana kuse), late 1790s.
Ōban, nishiki-e.
Kobe City Museum, Kobe.
Young Woman Applying Makeup seen from behind; above, a Poem in Chinese by Santō Kyōden, c. 1800.
Paint on paper, 132.9 × 49.4 cm.
Ōta Memorial Museum, Tokyo.
Young Dandy, c. 1800–1801.
Coloured ink on silk, 33.9 × 20.3 cm.
Rikardson-Kawano Collection, Tokyo.
In 1817, during one of Hokusai’s trips to Nagoya, the painter received an order for many book illustrations. Since his students vaunted the accuracy of representation of the beings and things in his drawings, particularly those in small formats, critics of ‘vulgar painting’ retorted that the little things produced by Hokusai’s brush were crafts and not art. These words hurt Hokusai and led him to say that, if a painter’s talent consisted in the size of the dimensions of his strokes and his works, he was ready to surprise his critics. This was when his student, Bokusen, and his friends came to help him execute, in public, a tremendous painting, a Darma of very different proportions than the one he painted in 1804. It was completed on the fifth day of the tenth month of the year, in front of the temple of Nishig-hakejo. The Japanese biography of Hokusai tells about this, from a story in drawings by Yenko-an, a friend of the painter.
In the middle of the north courtyard of the temple, protected by a fence, was spread a paper, specially made several times thicker than ordinary paper. On this piece of paper, Hokusai would paint a surface equivalent to that of 120 mats. Knowing that a Japanese mat measures 90 cm wide by 180 cm tall, this gave the artist a painting area 194 m long! To keep the paper stretched out, a very thick bed of rice straw was made, and at points, pieces of wood were set, serving as weights to keep the wind from lifting the paper. A scaffold was set up against the council chamber, facing the public. At the top of the scaffold, pulleys were attached to ropes in order to lift the immense drawing, fixed to a gigantic wood beam. Large brushes had been prepared, the smallest being the width of a broom. India ink was stored in enormous vats, to then be poured into a cask. These preparations occupied the entire morning, and from the first light of day, a crowd of nobles, yokels, women, old men, and children gathered in the temple courtyard to see the drawing produced.
In the afternoon, Hokusai and his students, in almost ceremonial garb, with bare legs and arms, got to work, students carrying ink in the cask, putting it into a bronze basin and accompanying the painter at work moving across the giant page. Hokusai first took a brush the width of a sheaf of hay. After dipping it in the ink, he drew the nose, and then the left eye of the Darma. He took several strides and drew the mouth and the ear. Then, he ran, tracing the outline of the head. That done, he completed the hair and the beard, taking, to shade them, another brush made strands of coconut that he dipped in a lighter India ink. At that moment, his students brought, on an immense platter, a brush made of rice sacks soaked in ink. To this brush was attached a rope. The brush was placed at a place indicated by Hokusai. He attached the rope around his neck and pulled the brush, with small steps, to make the thick lines of the Darma’s robe. When the lines were complete, he had to colour the robe red. Some students took that colour in buckets and spread it with shovels, while others mopped up the excess colour with wet towels. It was not until dusk that the Darma was completed. It was lifted up with the pulleys, but part of the paper stayed in the middle of the crowd, who, as in the Japanese expression, resembled an “army of ants around a piece of cake”. It was not until the next day that they were able to extend the scaffold sufficiently to lift the entire painting into the air.
This performance made Hokusai’s name burst out like a “thunder clap”. For some time, throughout the city, one saw everywhere, drawn on frames, screens, walls, and even in the sand by children, Darmas, this saint who had been deprived of sleep. According to the legend, indignant at having fallen asleep one night, he cut off his eyelids. He threw them far away, as if they were miserable sinners. By a miracle, his eyelids took root where they had fallen and a tea plant grew, giving the fragrant drink that drives away drowsiness. This was not the only huge painting that Hokusai executed. Later, he painted, in Honjô, a colossal horse. Later still, in Ryōgoku, he completed a giant hotel, that he signed, “Kintaïsga Hokusai”: “Hokusai of the house of the brocade sack”, alluding to the canvas sack carried by the gods. The day he painted the horse the size of an elephant, we are told that he laid his brush on a grain of rice, and when the grain