Hokusai is among the best-known names in Japanese art, and it may be thought that only a deficiency of imagination could lead to more writing on him. Many other artists of his period have been entirely neglected in the contemporary literature. But in fact, there is still more to be said, and this short essay will attempt to introduce some ideas that are probably unknown even to specialists. Hokusai has come to be thought of internationally as the Japanese artist par excellence, and his "Great Wave off Kanagawa," from the series Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji (Fugaku sanjurokkei ), can lay claim to being one of the world's most widely recognized works (Figure 1). However, Hokusai is not just the Japanese artist that foreigners love to love. In his own day he was widely regarded, and the Thirty-Six Views series just mentioned, which began in 1826, was finally brought to a close only in 1833, ultimately comprising forty-six designs. The extra ten can only have been created in response to clamor from the market.