Daikoku balancing rice bales, mallet, and rooster on his feet

Daikoku balancing rice bales, mallet, and rooster on his feet is one of Katsushika Hokusai's witty surimono designs, made around 1825 for a poetry club. Daikoku, the popular god of wealth and the kitchen, lies on his back and performs a juggling act with his attributes: heavy rice bales, his magical mallet, and a lively rooster, all spinning and balanced on the soles of his feet. Hokusai treats the deity not as a remote icon but as a comic acrobat, drawing him with rounded forms, broad smile, and a wonderfully relaxed posture even as the precarious load wobbles above him. As a surimono, the sheet was privately commissioned in a small edition and printed on thick paper with metallic pigments, embossing, and the finest workmanship, far beyond the standard of commercial Edo ukiyo-e. The composition combines auspicious imagery, rice for abundance, mallet for wishes, rooster for the new year, with a playful sense of physical comedy that connects to the Otsu-e folk tradition Hokusai admired. The Art Institute of Chicago holds this ukiyo-e print as part of its rich Hokusai collection, where the artist's surimono designs document a less commercial but no less inventive branch of Katsushika Hokusai's career and a vital current in late Edo ukiyo-e print culture.