Notebook of views of Mt. Fuji

The title's invocation of a notebook (chō) signals an album or sequence of small impressions of Fuji rather than a single monumental view, a format Maekawa Senpan favored for sustained meditation on a subject. Where Hokusai's Thirty-Six Views and Hiroshige's later series treated Fuji within the [meisho-e](/glossary/meisho-e) convention of celebrated places, Senpan's [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga) approach pares the mountain back to its essential silhouette, often paired with a foreground motif — a tiled roof, a grove, a stretch of paddy — drawn from his everyday observation. Each leaf would have been carved into its own set of cherry blocks and printed by the artist on [washi](/glossary/washi), the [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) at the base of the cone softening into mist or evening color. The intimacy of the album form suits his temperament: rather than the grandeur of a single [oban](/glossary/oban)-format Fuji, the notebook accumulates a series of quiet, personal encounters with the mountain, each carrying the irregularities of hand printing.