Katsuschika Hokusai
The great wave of Kanagawa
Interpretation
The Great Wave of Kanagawa by Japanese painter Katsuschika Hokusai is a ukiyo-e style woodcut released between 1830 and 1831 and is the first in a series entitled "Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji". It is a work that plunges you into a stormy and threatening wave on some boats off the port of Kanagawa.
At the bottom appears the snow-covered Mount Fuji, considered for the Japanese one of the most important religious symbols of the country. Mount Fuji is a recurring subject in Japanese art that has always been associated with majesty and beauty, the heart of many artistic expressions.
The dark colors contrasting with the outlines of the wave and Mount Fuji indicate how the scene is captured in the early hours of the morning, with the sun rising behind the viewer. The sea is the key element of the work, represented in the shape of a wave that extends throughout the scene in the moment before breaking. The drawing captures the instant in which the wave forms an almost perfect spiral whose center of the image is represented precisely by Mount Fuji in the background.
To give further dramatic emphasis to the work, Hokusai drew the wave in the act of moving from left to right, in contrast to the way the Japanese are used to reading images. In emakimonos, artists often resorted to this stratagem to amaze the reader, and Hokusai took up the concept using the wave as an element of surprise. In "The Big Wave" the fishermen are found off the coast of Kanagawa, returning from Edo, probably after selling their fish. Their boats do not flee from the wave, but go towards it, since that is the direction they must follow to reach their home.
With the eyes of a Japanese, the movement from right to left creates a strong image that contrasts the iconographic conformism of the time.
The idea of a wave, nature, which threatens fishermen, helpless workers is very realistic. For a Western eye, used to reading images from left to right, the sense of surprise disappears as the wave will be erroneously interpreted as the main subject given its position on the left in the image.