Hokusai manga (Hokusai Sketchbooks), vol. 10

Hokusai manga (Hokusai Sketchbooks), volume 10, is an illustrated woodblock-printed book designed by Katsushika Hokusai and published in 1819 as part of the celebrated Hokusai manga series. This volume is held in the Harvard Art Museums collection of Edo ukiyo-e books.

The Hokusai manga is one of the most influential illustrated book projects in the history of Japanese printmaking. Begun in 1814 and ultimately running to fifteen volumes, it gathers thousands of brushed sketches across every conceivable subject: ordinary townspeople, samurai, sumo wrestlers, courtiers, beggars, monkeys, fish, plants, architectural details, tools, supernatural beings, and gods. Each volume is printed in monochrome ink with a subtle second block of pink and grey wash, allowing Hokusai's brushed line to carry the principal expressive burden.

Volume 10, published five years into the project, finds Hokusai at full creative stride. Its pages survey acrobats, dancers, swordsmen, country laborers, and a host of small genre vignettes, alongside studies of birds, fish, and decorative pattern. The drawings are by turns precise and gestural, with passages of crisp outline used for figural anatomy and looser, more calligraphic brushwork employed for incidental detail. The volume gives a vivid sense of the documentary breadth that distinguishes the entire Hokusai manga project.

The Hokusai manga circulated widely among professional artists, craftspeople, decorators, and amateur draftsmen who used it as a pattern book and reference manual. In the mid-nineteenth century, copies travelled with Dutch and other European traders out of Nagasaki, where the manga became one of the principal vehicles through which Edo ukiyo-e and the visual vocabulary of Japanese drawing entered the consciousness of Western artists. As an artifact of Katsushika Hokusai's career, volume 10 remains a touchstone of Edo ukiyo-e book design.