Poem by Fujiwara no Yoshitaka, from the series One Hundred Poems by One Hundred Poets Explained by an Old Nurse

Poem by Fujiwara no Yoshitaka is part of Katsushika Hokusai's late series One Hundred Poems by One Hundred Poets Explained by an Old Nurse (Hyakunin isshu uba ga etoki), designed in the 1830s as illustrated commentaries on the classical Hyakunin Isshu anthology. Fujiwara no Yoshitaka, a tenth-century courtier, is known for an intense love poem expressing the wish to live longer for the sake of his beloved. Hokusai's response is characteristically oblique: instead of illustrating the verse literally, he sets the poem alongside an Edo-period genre scene whose figures and setting evoke the emotional climate of yearning and devotion described in the original waka. The Art Institute of Chicago impression preserves the soft, atmospheric printing that distinguishes good copies of the uba ga etoki set. As with the other sheets in the series, the design pairs the verse, inscribed in a cartouche, with a wide oban-format image in which figures, weather, and landscape combine into a meditative whole. The result is one of Hokusai's most successful integrations of word and picture in the ukiyo-e print medium. Within his late career, the uba ga etoki sheets sit beside the Mount Fuji series and the waterfalls and bridges sets as a third major landscape-and-figure project, anchoring Hokusai's lifelong engagement with classical literature in the popular visual language of nineteenth-century Edo woodblock publishing.