Katsushika Hokusai
Artwork: The Ghost of Oiwa, from One Hundred Ghost Stories, c. 1831
Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849) is the defining artist of ukiyo-e, the woodblock “pictures of the floating world” produced in Edo, now Tokyo. Across a career of more than seventy years he drew nearly everything: landscapes, actors, warriors, birds, and the sketchbooks he called manga. He signed his work with a succession of art names, each marking a new phase, and the Great Wave off Kanagawa carried his name far beyond Japan. His range was wider than any single image.
The works below come from the last great flowering of that range: One Hundred Ghost Stories (Hyaku Monogatari), designed around 1831, when Hokusai was in his seventies. Oiwa's face swelling out of a paper lantern, Okiku rising from her well in a body made of plates, the Laughing Demoness whose features double into a second face, and the skeleton of the actor Kohada Koheiji are ghost stories the whole country knew by heart, drawn by the one artist who could make them frightening and funny in the same line.
