A Walk Through Tokyo | Ryogoku

I've always loved Hokusai's ukiyo-e work The Great Wave off Kanagawa.

Because those wave crests that bloom into countless white flowers are so vivid, as if many small hands were trying to snatch away the fragile little boat.

This somehow let me see that Hokusai, who had painted his whole life, finally encountered Prussian blue in his old age, and with it came the exhilaration of freely expressing the seas and skies of Edo on canvas.

But today at the Hokusai Museum, I saw Shower Below the Peak. All at once it rose to become my favorite Hokusai work.

In Shower Below the Peak, dark clouds gather and lightning flashes at the foot of the mountain, while Mount Fuji's peak pierces through the clouds and rain, standing tall against the clear sky above.

Within the limited canvas, to express Mount Fuji's majesty, Hokusai used the weather as contrast, emphasizing the three-dimensional height.

In good works, such ingenuity seems to be everywhere. Literature, photography, painting, music—each has its own way.

I think that people who can realize their imagination using the tools at hand are the most remarkable, no matter what era they live in!