Tenji Tenno (The Emperor Tenji), first poet in the series One Hundred Poems by One Hundred Poets Explained by the Nurse

This 1830 ukiyo-e print by Katsushika Hokusai opens his ambitious series One Hundred Poems by One Hundred Poets Explained by the Nurse (Hyakunin isshu uba ga etoki), an unfinished cycle that reimagined the canonical Heian-era poetry anthology as scenes of everyday Japanese life. The first poet in the series, Emperor Tenji, composed a verse describing peasants huddling in a thatched hut during the autumn rice harvest, and Hokusai grounds the imperial poem in vivid agrarian reality. Farmers gather their sheaves, smoke drifts from a temporary shelter, and the landscape recedes in carefully calibrated bands of color that show his late mastery of Western-influenced perspective. By the time he designed this Edo ukiyo-e print, Hokusai was already in his seventies and had completed the Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, yet the Hundred Poets series demonstrates his continued appetite for ambitious narrative projects. The composition reflects his characteristic strategy of pairing aristocratic verse with the labor and weather of common life, transforming what could have been a courtly illustration into a meditation on Japanese topography and human persistence. Held in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, the print exemplifies how Hokusai used the ukiyo-e print medium to reinterpret classical literature for nineteenth-century audiences. The crisp registration, restrained palette, and atmospheric distance reveal the technical sophistication of late Edo woodblock printing, while the figures convey Hokusai's lifelong fascination with the rhythms of rural work. Collectors and scholars value this design both for its place at the head of an incomplete masterwork and for its role in expanding the visual vocabulary of ukiyo-e beyond the actor and beauty traditions that had dominated earlier decades.