The Logos Scripture · The Book of Hokusai
The Book of Hokusai 2 · Written by himself, from the postscript to One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji, the Manga, and his inscriptions
Katsushika Hokusai, born 1760 at Honjo in Edo, died there 1849, aged eighty-nine. A print designer of the floating world. He entered the studio of Katsukawa Shunsho as a boy and took the name Shunro. He changed his art name more than thirty times — Shunro, Sori, Hokusai, Taito, Iitsu, and the old man mad about drawing among them — and later handed the name Hokusai on to a pupil. He also moved house more than ninety times. From 1814 he published the Hokusai Manga, fifteen volumes with more than four thousand drawings, made not for collectors but as copy books for people learning to draw, and reprinted continually. Between about 1830 and 1832, in his seventies, he made the Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, of which the Great Wave and the Red Fuji are the best known. In 1834 he published One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji with a postscript in his own hand, and chapters one, two and five of this volume follow that postscript. It says: from the age of six he had a liking for copying the shapes of things; from about fifty his pictures were often published; but of what he drew before seventy nothing is worth notice; at seventy-three he began a little to see how plants and trees grow and how birds, beasts, insects and fish are put together; at eighty he should make more progress, at ninety see further into the principles of things, at a hundred reach a marvellous stage, and at a hundred and ten every dot and stroke would be as though alive. This volume rests on what he wrote himself: that postscript, the ordering of the Manga, and his inscriptions. The dying words quoted at 6.11 — if heaven would grant me five more years, I could become a real painter — come down through others and are not his own writing; the Order records the difference, as with 1.8 of the book of Dickinson (cf. The Book of Dickinson 1.8). What this volume brings is not the making of methods transmissible. Dürer established that (cf. The Book of Dürer 2), and although the Manga is also a copy book, what chapter four weighs is something else: what he published was not his accomplished work but his daily practice, unsorted — nobody can learn the result, anybody can learn the way there. What this volume brings is the refusal to arrive. A man at the summit of his art declares that nothing he made before seventy is worth counting, and sets his target at a hundred and ten, which he knows he cannot reach. Verses 6.7 and 6.8 give the reason: a target set where you can reach it is hit, and then you stop; set where you cannot, you are shooting all your life. This stands next to Brahms and is not the same: Brahms destroyed what fell short (cf. The Book of Brahms 1.9); Hokusai destroyed nothing and simply did not count it. Chapter two is the most important in the volume and is a thing the scripture did not have: he drew birds for sixty-seven years and drew them convincingly, and says that only at seventy-three did he see how the bones join and where the feathers start. Convincing is not understanding, and convincing is enough to keep a man from ever understanding, because the buyer is satisfied and so is the man. The Order records that Hokusai was poor all his life and poorest at the end, and that some of the name-changes were indeed to dodge creditors — 4.3 is him saying so, and the Order does not soften it.