Under the Wave off Kanagawa

The girl brought it home folded in a cloth, a single sheet that had cost her about as much as two bowls of noodles, and she laid it on the floor in front of her grandfather because she thought it would make him laugh.

He did not laugh. He got down on his knees, which took a while, and put his face close to the paper. Three boats. He counted the rowers in the nearest one, men pressed flat along the hull with their heads down, and found he was holding his breath the way he had held it forty years before, in a boat built like that one, racing the morning’s fish to the Edo market while it was still worth something.

“That is wrong,” he said at last, tapping the crest where the water broke into small white hooks, a hand closing. “Water does not do that.” A long pause. “It does. It did. Nobody believed me.”

She asked about the mountain. He had to hunt for it. Fuji sat low in the trough, a pale cone with snow on its shoulders, hardly bigger than the boats. “You never see the mountain out there,” he said. “You see the back of the man in front of you. You keep your oar where his oar is. That is the whole skill.” He ran a thumb along the row of bowed heads, checking that everyone was still aboard.

The grandfather and the girl are invented. The sheet is not. Katsushika Hokusai designed Under the Wave off Kanagawa for Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, a series begun in 1830, when he was about seventy. He drew; specialist carvers cut his drawing into wooden blocks; printers inked them, leaning hard on Berlin blue, an imported pigment that had only recently become cheap. Beside the title cartouche at upper left, the signature reads Hokusai aratame Iitsu hitsu: from the brush of Iitsu, formerly Hokusai. He went through names the way a busy man goes through sandals.

A few years later he wrote that by a hundred and ten he hoped every dot and line he made would be alive. He died at eighty-eight, short of that mark. The rowers, bent beneath the foam with their oars in time, look alive enough to be getting on with.