Hokusai. Edmond de Goncourt

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      1823:

      – A series of actors, in five plates, actors in the style of Toyokuni, and that Hokusai signed: “I-itsu, the old man of Katsushika being a monkey and imitating others.”

      1825:

      – Two cranes at the seashore.

      1826:

      – Princess Tamamo-No-Mae, who is a nine tailed fox metamorphosed into a woman, whose nine tails are represented by the embossing of the print in the train of her robe.

      1829:

      – A woman riding a bull.

      1835:

      A fisherman at the seashore, a pipe in his mouth, a line between his legs crossed one over the other. One might be tempted to see, in this old bald man with a bony nose, a jeering mouth, and the physiognomy of an ironic kalmouck, a portrait of Hokusai. Moreover, the legend behind this plate is as follows, “what a novel thing to be able to grow a young bride (the name of a Japanese species of lettuce) in the sand at the beach!” This colour print was made for New Year’s Day of the year following the one in which Hokusai was able to arrange a marriage for his grandson, and with this double entendre he was able to express his joy at the entrance into the house of his grandson’s young bride.

      2. Yellow Books

      Hokusai’s compositions from 1780–90, like the first compositions by Utamaro, were engraved in little books, those popular books printed in black and white with a yellow cover from which they take their name: kibyoshi. They are small volumes 17 cm tall by 12.5 cm wide, with text and drawings. Each volume is typically composed of five sheets.

      The first yellow book that he illustrated, in 1781, at the age of twenty-one, was a small novel in three volumes, entitled: Arigataï tsuno itiji, “With a Courteous Word, Anything is Permitted”, a novel of which no copies remain and whose text was first attributed, at the time it was published, to Kitao Masanobu, and then later to the famous novelist Kioden. However, the text and drawings are by Hokusai, who had published this pamphlet under the pseudonym of Korewasaï, which means, “Is that the one?”, the refrain of a little song at that time.

      The following year, in 1782, Hokusai published a yellow book, Kamakura Tsushinden, “The Warriors of Kamakura”, two fascicules for which he did the text and the drawings and that he presented to the public under the name of Guiobutsu for the text, and Shunro for the drawings. The difficulty of translating Japanese thoughts into western languages has sometimes created differences in translations of the titles of books and novels, improvised through tête-à-tête work and translations long-thought out through solitary work.