Word: hokusai
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...personal favorite of NBM's recent adaptations, "The Yellow Jar" (48 pp.; $12.95) by the previously unpublished Patrick Atangan, doesn't look or read anything like your typical Japanese comic. No saucer eyes, robots or schoolgirl outfits can be found. With Hokusai and Gustav Klimt as his influences Atangan has adapted a pair of Japanese folk tales into a gorgeous hybrid of comix and prints of ancient Japan. The titular story begins when a fisherman collects a yellow jar in his net. Somewhat disappointed that it contains no treasure, instead he finds that it holds a sleeping woman. She agrees...
...whose image of the actor Otani Oniji III playing a samurai's manservant, all red-rimmed eyes and stylish snarl, is a deliciously succinct expression of fictive bloody-mindedness. Through the medium of prints, the range of things that could be depicted widened to take in all Japan. Katsushika Hokusai's Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji and Ando Hiroshige's Fifty-Three Stations of the Tokaido are both travelogues and social listings, in which every sort of occupation, from pit sawing to innkeeping, gets its allotted description. This scrutiny of lower-class life would never have held so much...
...most beautiful of his Thames nocturnes of the 1870s, depicting Old Battersea Bridge in a luminous blue twilight, appearance is sliding off into illegibility under the aegis of Japanese prints; Hokusai, one of Whistler's favorite artists, had done a similar scene of fireworks at night behind a tall wooden bridge. The real Battersea Bridge was too stumpy for Whistler, so he made it into a tall Orientalized dream, with the falling rocket fire spangling the dusk like gold flakes on Japanese maki-e enamel. If he could choose where he was born, he could certainly decide what country...
...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...