Twilight settles over the Edo period, and spring breathes its gentle promise along the banks of the Sumida River. In a modest workshop, an old man, seventy-one, bends over a block of mountain cherry wood. With a slender knife, he inscribes seven characters: Hokusai aratame Iitsu hitsu, from the brush of Iitsu, once Hokusai. It is, by now, perhaps his twenty-somethingth name, and not the last he will borrow for his restless artistry.
This humble block will become the matrix for the thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, a series destined for such success that ten more views will soon be pressed into existence.
Three years on, in the postscript to a book born of the same magnetic pull toward Fuji, Hokusai will confess that nothing he made before seventy was worth looking at. He signs off with a fresh name: gakyō rōjin, the old man mad about drawing. It is a name newly carved, yet the sentiment has been his silent companion all along, like a loyal mantra whispered beneath every stroke.
Most of us …
