(Transmitted from the Gods) Hokusai Sketches (Denshin kaishu Hokusai manga), vol. 2

(Transmitted from the Gods) Hokusai Sketches (Denshin kaishu Hokusai manga), volume 2, is an illustrated woodblock-printed book designed by Katsushika Hokusai and published in 1834 as part of the multi-volume Hokusai manga series. The Victoria and Albert Museum holds this volume in its collection of Edo ukiyo-e books and albums.

The Hokusai manga, begun in 1814 and continued by collaborators and successors well after the artist's death, is one of the most influential illustrated book projects in the history of Japanese printmaking. Each volume gathers hundreds of brush-style sketches of human figures in every conceivable posture and occupation, alongside animals, plants, landscape motifs, architectural details, supernatural beings, and tools of the trades. The title's full Japanese form invokes the idea of drawings transmitted from the gods, signaling the encyclopedic and almost devotional scope of Hokusai's documentary ambition.

Volume 2 maintains the format of monochrome printing accented in subtle pink and grey wash blocks. Its pages range across acrobats, sumo wrestlers, swordsmen at practice, working women at the well, beggars, courtiers, and a host of figures drawn from contemporary Edo life. Hokusai's line work is by turns crisp and gestural, demonstrating the brush vocabulary he had spent decades refining. The volume circulated widely among artists, craftspeople, and ordinary readers who used it as both a pattern book and a source of entertainment, and copies travelled along trade routes to Europe where the manga became one of the principal vehicles by which Japonisme reached Western artists.

As an artifact of Edo ukiyo-e culture, this ukiyo-e print volume by Katsushika Hokusai documents the artist's role as teacher and observer as fully as it documents his graphic invention.