Captions of the 15 volumes of Hokusai Manga
Ten volumes of the Hokusai Manga have been in possession of my family for decades, but until now I had never spent much time looking at them carefully. I did once borrow the two volumes of Ferrer's book from a library, but again became discouraged at the wealth of information to assimilate if I were to make sense of these Manga. Now I have finally taken the time to document the fifteen volumes in full detail. The wealth and variety of information is still hard to master : famous Japanese and Chinese poets, warriors, legendary figures, mythology, Buddhist gods, animals and plants, monsters, ordinary scenes from the countryside, the mountains, the cities, to name a few. In summary, the Manga are "a pictorial encyclopedia of old Japan", to quote Evgeny Steiner. Some volumes are dominated by a theme or more : Chinese immortals (vol.3 and 10), architecture and famous poets (vol. 5), horses and martial arts (vol. 6), famous places in Japan (vol. 7), silk weaving (vol. 8), humorous sketches with puns (vol. 12). Volume 14 and 15 were published after Hokusai's death. Their content differs markedly from those of the previous volumes. Volume 14 contains drawings that are more elaborate than the typical spontaneous Manga sketches. Volume 15 is a fake, in the sense that many drawings were unscrupulously taken from Shūga Ichiran (published by Hokusai in 1819), and presumably also from works by other artists. I give links to such drawings (from the Ritsumeikan website) when possible.
Rather than posting images of each Manga page facing the documentation, I have chosen to give links to such images. One thus has a better view of the contents of the whole volumes. When clicking on the link with the left button of the mouse, the image appears in a small window which can be moved, enlarged, erased. When clicking instead on the link with the scroll (middle) button, the image appears in a new tab. The images are those of the Art Research Center of Ritsumeikan University (image 1) and of the Pulverer collection at the Freer Gallery of Art (image 2). Note that image 2 can be zoomed more than image 1 and that clicking on the left or the right of that image one moves forward or backward in the volume. As the two copies of the different volumes are sometimes not of the same edition, differences may appear in the text, which then are indicated as such. One folio of volume 5 from the Pulverer Collection is misplaced and complicates the presentation of the texts and images. A last caveat is that the Pulverer Collection website sometimes is down for maintenance.
Next to the links to images is a link to a description in Japanese of the Manga pages by a blogger (Matta), which has been very helpful for reading and translating the texts. For those Manga pages with no text, I translated the descriptions by Matta, I cannot garantee that Matta's identifications are always correct. Furthermore, I mostly relied on machine translations, which might be incorrect in some cases. In some instances, I added my own explanations in brackets. There are other detailed descriptions of the Manga available, notably the book by Steiner (2016) where all sketches are commented, the subjects and motives identified and the texts translated into Russian. Other books include that of Forrer, and that of Steiner (2014). Names of famous persons, of exotic animals, of gods, as well as unfamiliar Japanese words are linked to the corresponding Wikipedia page, when available. Links to prints by Hokusai or other artists illustrating the same subject are given when possible. Most of them are from the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston; the ones of the famous Chinese are from the book Gasen (画筌) by Hayashi Moriatsu. Some of these prints show that Hokusai used them as inspiration for his Manga (e.g. Children on an anchor in vol.1, p.7, famous Chinese in vol.3, 4 and 10, the Chinese official on the frontispiece of vol.12, the pounding of rice for mochi in vol.12, p.22). Finally, note that my numbering of the captions into "pages" is ad hoc, and does not correspond to the numbers written in the page margins of the volumes.
This documentation is only a first step towards a full understanding of the Manga. The texts are sometimes not translated or missing altogether, for my lack of competence. The links to wikipedia pages and similar prints are useful, no doubt, but the reader has to make his own judgment for understanding the scenes in the light of these references. And crucially missing is an overall view of the progression of the themes in each volume. To my defense, many western specialists have missed the essence of the Manga, labelling them disorganized or random sketches.
This coherence of the Manga has been emphasized by Steiner in his publications and online lectures. For him, the Manga themes follow the principles of organization of Japanese poetic anthologies, namely by association and progression. In that sense, the Manga are the pictorial analog of renga.
Let me give a few examples, most of them mentioned by Steiner:
-- Take the image of Mount Fuji (vol.5, p.25) interrupting sketches of famous poets : it follows the picture of Yamabe no Akahito, whose poem about Fuji is included in the Hyakunin Isshū, and preceeds that of Fun'ya no Yasuhide, another poet celebrating mountain views.
-- On page 11 of vol.1, the central scene is that of a famous scene from a Kabuki play, above are women perhaps reading about this play, and below is a priest exorcising the spider with his special whisk.
-- vol.3 begins with the four heavenly kings and Mount Meru, which is their dwelling, and ends with a group of ghosts and Shōki, who is their king in Hell.
-- links between the first and last image : the invisibility hat and cloak as first and last item of the last page of vol.3, ivy on the last page of vol.6 and on the frontispiece (page 3) of vol.7; a crane on page 4 of vol.7 and a turtle on last page, both animals symbols of longevity; Mt Tsukuba on page 5 and Mt Fuji on next to last page of vol.7; Jurōjin at the end of vol.10 and the beginning of vol.11; "good fortune" subjects on first and two last pages of vol.12 .
-- links between the number of the volume and the number of items on the frontispiece (vol.8, 9, 12, 13).
The individual Manga should perhaps also be viewed like Chinese paintings, which, beyond the mountain and waterfall sceneries, convey the inner feelings of the artist. Many sketches have an underlying religious significance, which in many cases may escape the inattentive reader. Hokusai was a member of the Nichiren sect, and his understanding of the world was probably influenced by the Buddhist concept of Mayâ, or "illusion". Let the last word on the deeper meaning of the Manga be by Henri Focillon: he considers that the talent of Hokusai is to capture life in its most secret springs by the prodigious gift of animating matter, of infusing it with the Buddhist spirit, of masterly suggesting it by a few strokes.
The prefaces are presented separately. A link to a third image (digitized by Gallica) has been added, when image 1 and/or image 2 is missing (volumes 6 and 15) or from a different edition (volume 1) than the transcribed text. I included the preface from my own copy of volume 6, since the other one is barely readable in places. The texts of prefaces 1 to 14 were taken from Sakai Kokodo Gallery (links to the individual volumes are given lower down that page). The preface to volume 3 is also given by Matta. I did not venture to translate them, as machine translation is notoriously unadapted to older texts.
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