Featured on PDR in the collection Hokusai’s Ghost Stories (ca. 1830)

Katsushika Hokusai’s wood block print of a gigantic wave frothing before Mount Fuji, which he made in his seventies, is so beloved and influential that the scholar Christine Guth has devoted a whole book to it. Less attention has been paid to the beguiling illustrations he crafted, also while in his seventies, for the series Hyaku Monogatari [One Hundred Ghost Stories] (ca. 1830). We aren’t sure why the project never reached its probable goal of a century of pictures but the five that were completed are a dark delight. In the prints Hokusai directs his attention away from the Japanese landscapes he was most famous for depicting, inwards towards a realm of vengeful ghosts and demonic cannibals.