Abe no Nakamaro, from the series A True Mirror of Chinese and Japanese Poems

Abe no Nakamaro is an ukiyo-e print by Katsushika Hokusai from the series A True Mirror of Chinese and Japanese Poems (Shiika shashinkyo), dated about 1828 and held in the Art Institute of Chicago. Abe no Nakamaro was an eighth-century Japanese aristocrat sent to Tang China as part of an imperial embassy. He passed the rigorous Chinese civil service examinations, served in high office, and ultimately died abroad without returning home. His most famous waka poem, composed during a farewell banquet, looks up at the moon over the Chinese coast and remembers the same moon rising over Mount Mikasa in his native Nara. Hokusai's design draws on this story, showing Nakamaro and his Chinese hosts gathered on a high platform, with the moon hovering above distant hills and the sea. The composition pairs classical Japanese sentiment with carefully rendered Tang Chinese architecture, costume, and ceremonial objects, demonstrating Hokusai's interest in transcultural historical imagination. As an Edo ukiyo-e print, the work participates in the late 1820s vogue for poetry series that paired portraits of historical figures with their landscapes or signature scenes. The Art Institute of Chicago preserves this ukiyo-e print as part of its broad holdings of Katsushika Hokusai's literary subjects, documenting how the artist used the woodblock medium to visualize centuries-old poetic memory for nineteenth-century Edo audiences.