As my fifteen year old son sets off to the picture frame shop on Smith Street to buy an A2 asized frame for his newly purchased Hokusai print of 'A woman ghost appeared from a well' I reflected on the boom of all things Japanese at the moment. Despite Rocket Man and his suicidal tendencies in North Korea, there has been no halt to the steady stream of visitors from around the world to Japan. On top of that, Japanese born, British novelist, Kazuo Ishiguro just won the 2017 Nobel Prize for Literature.
But let's get back to the Hokusai exhibition at the National gallery in St Kilda Road, Melbourne. My wife set off first and then I got a phone call asking where I was? I explained that I was waiting for our son who had decided that he would join us. This surprised her. His interests seemed to be mostly designer clothes and basketball.
Anyway, we got to the gallery and my heart sank when I saw the queue. Luckily, that was the queue for the Dior exhibition. The line waiting to buy tickets for Hokusai was much shorter but there were quite a few people inside. The exhibition made a big deal of the Prussian blue paint that he used, especially in the series Thirty-six views of Mount Fuji. There were two copies of the 'Great Wave' on display, one from the Ukiyo-e museum in Matsumoto and one from the local gallery. Both had a crease down the middle which fascinated us but about which there was no commentary whatsoever. After days of speculation Steve came up with the idea that that was where the paper met during the printing of the wood blocks. No wiser, we could only observe that one seemed a lot more faded than the other.
It was evident that Hokusai was prolific and while there were no examples of his shunga (erotica) there were illustrations of famous poems as well as comic sketches collected in manga and stories inspired by ghost stories. One was of an event featuring one hundred candles where after each story a candle was blown out until the last one which was blown out after the last story. Very creepy. When my son bought a copy of the 'A woman ghost appeared from a well' the brochure explained that this was the inspiration for the popular Japanese horror movie called The Ring. That explained the obsession with the well if not the TV screens.
There was a series based on the Ryukyu isalnds but it turned out these were copied from books as Hokusai had never visited these islands. He had also illustrated a number of famous poems but he removed the important personages from the past and instead celebrated the lives of ordinary folk like farmers instead. This democratic instinct resonated well with a modern-day audience hungry to learn more about all things Japanese. My favourite picture was of the 'Snow Traveller'. The two pines in the background reflecting the two figures rugged up against the snow in the foreground on the narrow moutain pass create a sense of harmony and at oneness-with-nature that is elusive in rea life but here appears to be so simple. The way Hokusai used recurring shapes was also repeated in the 'Great Wave' where unobserved by many untutored eyes it waas pointed out that the shape of the mountain is repeated in a much smaller wave in the foreground. One of the joys of knowing what you are looking at was thus made apparent to me.
My son walked home with his prize copy of 'A woman ghiost appeared from a well'. Now he is on his way to have it framed. Hopefully he will have it for a long time, long after the fading and peeling posters have disappeared from the multitude of building sites around the city.
