More years ago than I care to reflect upon, I was recommended a graphic novel called Logicomix which examined the developments and debates in mathematics and logic that dominated the early twentieth century through the lens of the life of famous philosopher Bertrand Russell. Logicomix narrative was multi-layered, intermixing the story of the writing of the book itself with the life of Russell and his contemporaries, and even tying in ancient Greek tragedy in a rather unexpected way. It really convinced me that graphic novels could not only be entertaining but also highly informative and great pieces of scholarship in their own right. Logicomix does a better job explaining Gödel’s contribution to logic than many books I’ve read.
My past experience with Logicomix meant that I was intrigued when I was given a copy of Hokusai: A Graphic Biography by Giuseppe Latanza and Francesco Matteuzzi for my birthday. I’m a big fan of Hokusai’s work – seeing some of his original prints on my trip to Japan in 2019 was a highlight even if we were unable to make time to visit the Hokusai Museum in Tokyo. I also had an idea that his life was a bit…eccentric to put it mildly, so this promised to be an interesting read. It also brought to mind the anime film Miss Hokusai which adapted vignettes from a manga about the life and artistic career of Hokusai’s most famous daughter, Katsushika Ōi. Unlike Miss Hokusai, Hokusai: A Graphic Biography is a western production intended for a European and North American audience rather than a Japanese one. This is made very clear by the choice to intersperse the story of Hokusai and his life with pages of text explaining Edo era Japan for the uninitiated.
Like the film adaptation of Miss Hokusai, Hokusai: A Graphic Biography is more a series of vignettes and short anecdotes about Hokusai’s life rather than a straightforward biography. It is broadly chronological and covers the main phases in Hokusai’s artistic career but focuses more on moments of change or significant achievements rather than looking at his day-to-day existence. It also largely ignores his personal life; we get a brief mention of the death of his first wife, but his subsequent marriages are entirely unmentioned. One of his (in the story nameless) daughters plays a role in a scene later in his life, but the artistic career of his daughter Ōi, including her time apprenticing with him, along with the lives of any of his numerous other children are absent from the narrative. Arguably these aspects are not central to the book’s focus of exploring the artistic career of Hokusai. This would hardly be the first work to focus primarily on Hokusai’s art over his personal life, but I would have preferred to learn more about Hokusai the person as well as the artist.
Hokusai: A Graphic Biography went up several steps in my opinion based on the quality of its Afterword, which is not something I can usually say. In those two pages the authors explain how difficult it was to piece together the life of Hokusai. While the artist was an ardent self-promoter and left significant autobiographical information behind, he was also a deeply unreliable narrator of his own life and many of his stories are fantastical and lack corroboration from other sources. This makes it very difficult to piece together a “true” history of Hokusai – and this is possibly why so many accounts prefer to just focus on the art and his career and leave aside the thornier issues of interpreting his life outside of his work. I do wish this was somewhere in the main text instead of relegated to an Afterword. It was far more interesting than the straightforward account of Japanese history that separated the chapters about Hokusai.
Hokusai: A Graphic Biography focuses quite a bit on some of Hokusai’s more extravagant artistic displays, such as this event where he painted a giant portrait of Bodhidharma using a broom as his brush.
The pages describing Edo era Japan are largely fine – nothing revelatory or historiographically ground-breaking, but then you wouldn’t really expect that in a graphic novel for general readers. I saw a few popular myths/exaggerations about Edo era Japan scattered throughout the text but nothing particularly egregious. For the most part these are fine, they didn’t wow me but for people who aren’t already familiar with the subject they will be a useful introduction.
The place where Hokusai: A Graphic Biography really shines is in the art. Giuseppe Latanza’s artwork is phenomenal. It draws inspiration from Hokusai’s work but is also distinctly its own thing. As you would want from a graphic novel biography, the visual element is vital to the story told in the book. Perhaps this is why I didn’t like the historical explainers as much – they were often largely devoid of art. I was a little disappointed to see that some of the art is reused in a few places, but I can also appreciate that drawing something like this must have been very time consuming and a little light re-use cannot be entirely condemned. I would have just preferred more art, as should be clear by this stage. The only other fault I could find is that I would have liked it if they tried to include more dramatic compositions – the framing of the characters can be a bit too straightforward. I really like a panel late in the book that intersperses modern era Tokyo with classic Edo, and I wish the art took a little more effort to push the limits of what is possible in the medium. That said, that is personal preference and I’m sure a weirder artistic take would put some people off as well!
Art is obviously subjective, but I really like this aesthetic - particularly the image of Fuji in the background taking direct inspiration from Hokusai’s work.
Overall, I liked Hokusai: A Graphic Biography even if it didn’t wow me the same way Logicomix did. I will still continue to periodically check out how graphic novels are helping us to understand history, because I think it is a method that has great potential and is often underutilised. Arguably there is no better way to tell the story of the life and career of a famous artist than through a visual medium, and in that regard Hokusai: A Graphic Biography is a great little read.