The record-breaking attendance at the recent Hokusai exhibition at the Sackler Gallery in Washington, DC (March 4–May 14, 2006) proves that at least one Japanese artist draws crowds as well as Monet. The focus of an exhibition at the Fine Art Society in London in 1890 and countless exhibitions thereafter, more has been published on Hokusai in Western languages than on any other Japanese artist. In the postwar period, Richard Lane, Jack Hillier, and Matthi Forrer contributed the standard volumes on Hokusai in English. Then, beginning in 1990, Gian Carlo Calza, head of the International Hokusai Research Centre, spearheaded three international conferences that with the help of John Carpenter have resulted in three major publications: first, Hokusai Paintings (Venice: University of Venice, 1994); followed by Calza’s own volume with seven contributing essays, Hokusai (London: Phaidon Press, 2003); and now Hokusai and His Age. Lavishly illustrated, with over half of the fifteen essays written specifically for this publication, Hokusai and His Age goes far beyond a conference book. A new, multifarious Hokusai emerges.

In the introduction, Carpenter characterizes Hokusai as a “polymath,” and this is reiterated throughout the book. This is a shift from fifty years ago, when Hillier summed up his significance simply with the words “draughtsmanship” and “design” (Hokusai: Paintings, Drawings, and Woodcuts, Oxford: Phaidon Press, 1955). In some ways, it is perhaps reminiscent of French writers and critics at the height of Japonisme, who seemed to delight most in Hokusai’s fecundity and seemingly infinite variation, as exemplified in his long running series of “random sketches,” Manga. Hokusai and His Age allows one to savor the range and diversity of Hokusai—a late bloomer who, along with designing thousands of woodblock prints, illustrated numerous novels, art manuals, and privately published “wild verse” sheets (surimono), and who also painted copiously in two distinct modes over a seventy-year span.

One would have to refer to Calza’s Hokusai for the latest discussion of the artist according to his standard periodization by artistic name. Hokusai and His Age is divided according to media: half is devoted to a discussion of Hokusai’s paintings, while the remaining part looks at Hokusai in print. Thanks to Carpenter’s superlative editing, contrary to the usual caveat, all of the fifteen self-contained essays are of consistently high quality. If there is any uneven aspect to the collection, it is that some of the chapters are written more with the specialist in mind while others are for the general reader as well.

The chapters focusing on Hokusai’s painting reveal an international scholarly effort to authenticate, date, and document, which has been among the primary goals of the International Hokusai Research Centre. One realizes the complexity of the issues by reading the reasoned discussion in Calza’s chapter. Hokusai’s problematic paintings are not solely the result of the fact that “Hokusai” paintings sold to Western collectors for a pretty penny at the turn of the last century. Hokusai had enough name recognition value to be copied in his own day. Some of the paintings signed by Hokusai himself were studio works; others by his pupils done without supervision bear Hokusai’s seal since he passed his seals on to his successors upon changing artistic names. Using the A to E ranking system proposed by Tsuji Nobuo (in Hokusai Paintings) as a framework, Calza’s analysis goes beyond merely arguing whether this or that work is genuine or fraudulent, but attempts to reconstruct in what type of environment the questioned painting was created—for example, Hokusai’s own studio or a later studio producing for foreign clientele.

Overall, despite minor differences, there does seem to be an emerging consensus on the dates within Hokusai’s career. Roger Keyes, in a wide-ranging essay that touches on the importance of Hokusai’s spirituality, uses knowledge of Hokusai prints amassed from his experience collating a catalogue raisonné of 4,000 prints started in the 1970s with the late Peter Morse to date his paintings. In what will be an important reference for years to come, Asano Shûgo charts and details the usage of Hokusai’s seals. Between the two approaches there is at most a discrepancy of a year or two; their strongest point of difference seems to be whether the artist name used from about 1800–14 is to be read Tokimasa or Tatsumasa.

Formal issues are not given short shrift. Naitô Masatô, in an essay on Hokusai’s early eighteenth-century paintings of beauties, pinpoints Hokusai’s ability to balance groups of figures in unusual and geometrically complex ways, often with a precarious, off-center tension. Carpenter, within his rich discussion of Hokusai’s impromptu paintings inscribed by writers and poets of the day, interprets Hokusai’s full-face views as embodying an “I-you” dialogue, and the profile as emphasizing “the complete detachment of subject from viewer, even while the viewer may transfix the viewer’s attention” (42).

Although works by Hokusai’s pupils are found in many major museums, there are few concerted studies of Hokusai’s studio style. Timothy Clark identifies the crinkled outline, most seen in the “frilly undergarment,” as marking the brand of the Hokusai school among his minor pupils. An essay by Kobayashi Tadashi translated and superbly adapted by Julie Nelson Davis describes one of Hokusai’s most talented followers, his own daughter Ôi. This rare monograph of a Japanese woman artist, one that combines biography and formal analysis to consider how her gender might have affected her poignant, sometimes gruesome, expressiveness would make an excellent addition to an undergraduate reader.

The sheer grace of translation throughout the book carries much of the weight of the scholarship. Six of the essays are translated, providing access to recent Japanese scholarship. Only a generation ago, translations and explications of paintings’ inscriptions such as inform Carpenter’s abovementioned chapter were all too rare. Discussing one example among many, Wakashû (Young Man; an elegant male “beauty”), inscribed by Ota Nanpo, Carpenter not only reveals the homoerotic double entendres contained in the poem, but reconstructs the background circumstances of the painting from a combination of primary sources. Kobayashi Kumiko and Kubota Kazuhiro contribute two other essays that provide access to the practices of the kyôka literary circles, which affected the style and format of surimono, the privately commissioned image/poem sheets in which Hokusai excelled mid-career. In another vein entirely, John Rosenfield translates the humor in Hokusai’s art manuals, books done for a broad readership, into universal terms. And applaudably, Hokusai’s shunga (erotica), Manpuku Wagôjin—The Gods of Conjugal Delights, is translated with a brief commentary by David Pollack—to my knowledge the first shunga album to be presented in its entirety in English. This delightful female sexual “Prince and the Pauper” escapade, which manages to amuse and preach at once, is particularly revealing of the era’s social tensions.

Hokusai’s indebtedness to Western techniques of viewing seems to have become a minor yet recurring theme in Hokusai studies in the last few decades. Hokusai and His Age includes an essay by Tsuji Nobuo originally published in French in 1989, “The Impact of Western Book Illustration on the Designs of Hokusai—The Key to His Originality,” which, similar to arguments made by Forrer and Masatomo Kawai, considers Hokusai’s ability to integrate Western visual modes crucial to his artistic achievements. Certainly, it is important to see Tsuji’s indisputable visual evidence of Hokusai’s appropriations of Western images from imported visual manuals. However, considering that Hokusai appropriated as much or more from Chinese and Japanese imagery, this particular line of inquiry strikes me as a compensatory reaction to Hokusai’s widely ascribed influence on the West.

Three other essays concern themselves with the presence of the West within Hokusai’s work, yet they each employ varying methodologies that consciously avoid an implied hierarchy of influence. Timon Screech, in his “Hokusai and the Microscope,” is expressly not so much concerned with whether Hokusai’s artistic epistemology was derivative of the West, but rather is interested in “points where Hokusai challenges the Western idiom, makes it bear strain or subverts it” (329). By comparing Hokusai’s depictions of the microscope with others by contemporaries, he concludes that for the Japanese of the time such Western viewing instruments symbolized a way to examine the self in three ways: as an existential “Daoist,” as a “searcher” for truth and lies, and as the “empirical scientist.” Doris Croissant considers Hokusai’s surimono as “still life” (knowingly anachronistic in the manner of Norman Bryson), and relates it to the “still-life” oils of Takahashi Yûichi (1820–94). Although she does not dismiss the artistic impact of Dutch still life on Hokusai’s surimono, she also teases out variations in meaning these renderings might have conveyed, and ultimately interprets the still life in both Hokusai’s surimono and in Takahashi’s oil paintings as signaling auspicious gift exchange. Henry Smith’s chapter on the “blue revolution” of “Berlin blue” (bero in Japanese) is a particularly rich and detailed discussion of the impact of the importation of the pigment best known as “Prussian blue” in English. Using a material culture approach, he delineates the importation of the pigment by Chinese and Dutch traders, and shows how bero gradually, then suddenly, became the predominant color of ukiyo-e from the 1830s. He responds to past and recent Japanese arguments on the dating of the prints within the famous Thirty-six Views of Mt. Fuji, and goes on to connect the fashionable rage for blue during what was politically a tumultuous era with the way the color expressed the tranquility of landscape, the melancholy of the ghostly otherworld, and a longing for the overseas of not just the West but Asia.

Collectively, the essays in this volume avoid the obvious limitations of a narrow monographic approach. The boundary of “Hokusai” is widened by considering such issues as the mannerism that became formulaic for his minor pupils, his close alliances with contemporary literary circles, and the shared contemporary meanings of the microscope. Yet because in my view Hokusai was not unique to his age, but rather one popular artist among others, I look forward to further studies that set Hokusai firmly within his time by more fully exploring Hokusai’s commonalities with his contemporaries. As long as originality is no longer at stake, we can explore with impunity Hokusai and his fellow artists’ visual borrowings from the West, from China, from the Japanese past, and from each other—in both rivalry and collaboration.