Word: hokusai
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Japanese word ukiyo -- "the floating world" -- suggests the narrow bridges of Hiroshige or the frozen waves of Hokusai. In Kadohata's novel of the '60s, a Japanese American redefines ukiyo as the Western U.S., a place of "gas station attendants, restaurants, and jobs we depended on, the motel towns floating in the middle of fields and mountains." Kadohata has a painter's eye, and her narrator's scroll is filled with scrupulously detailed portraits -- of her tyrannical grandmother, of herself and her lovers and, memorably, of unassimilated migrant workers, like "animals migrating across a field . . . moving from the hard life...
...memory sends Alexander into a lyrical flight: "Wonderfully smelling, thin, fresh waffles, which were twisted, still hot, into cornets and crammed with cream--the very image of waves, heaving hump-backed and white-crested as they reach the shore, to topple, curl and close like the wave of Hokusai...
Vincent was ill when he arrived in Aries, jittery from booze, racked with smoker's cough. He had expected, curiously enough, that the place would look like one of the Japanese prints by Hokusai or Utamaro that had been circulating among avant-garde painters in Paris. In a way it did: the ground was covered with snow, like the top of Fuji. But soon it (and he) melted, and in his letters no less than in his paintings one sees the colors that sign his Arlesian period, the yellow, ultramarine and mauve. In the late spring, "the landscape gets...
Just to mention Japanese woodcuts is to evoke the name of Hokusai (1760-1849), who produced some of the finest examples of the genre. In The Art of Hokusai in Book Illustration (Sotheby Parke Bernet/ University of California; 288 pages; $110), Scholar Jack Hillier explores seven decades of artistry. Hokusai, who began by illustrating cheap 18th century novelettes known as kibyŏshi ("yellow-backs"), was prolific; he once illustrated 61 volumes of a Chinese classic. As Hillier observes, the man was an "encyclopedist of Japanese life and custom." That life and custom included portraiture, nature studies and some explicit...