On The Wave

Hokusai is often called the great drawer of waves, but it would be more accurate to call him the great drawer of attention. The Great Wave is not really a picture of water — it is a picture of what water makes you do.

The boats are too small. That is the point. Three of them, packed with rowers, scarcely visible against the foam. The wave is not breaking on them; it is deciding to break on them. The fingers of foam at its crest are claws.

And then, behind it all — Mount Fuji. The whole composition is a joke about scale, and the punchline is that we have been wrong all along about what was big and what was small.

I bought the print in Kyoto in the spring of 2019, on a morning when it was raining lightly and the smell of cedar came in under the doors of the shop. The dealer had three states of the same image; this one is from a later printing, which means the lines are softer. I prefer it that way.