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  • Hokusai’s Great Wave: Biography of a Global Icon by Christine M. E. Guth
  • Noriko Murai
Hokusai’s Great Wave: Biography of a Global Icon. By Christine M. E. Guth. University of Hawai‘i Press, 2015. 272pages. Hardcover $57.00; softcover $20.00.

In Hokusai’s Great Wave, Christine Guth, citing the work of art historian Martin Kemp, defines an iconic image as one that “has achieved wholly exceptional levels of widespread recognizability” and is marked by “a schematic shape . . . easily recognizable in whatever the medium . . . , elastic connotations, and visual ubiquity” (p. 6). The color woodblock print “Kanagawa-oki nami ura” (Under the Wave off Kanagawa), designed by Katsushika Hokusai in 1831 for his series Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, has undeniably become such an icon. Whether in the form of the prized original impressions on display at premier art institutions in New York, Boston, or London or its morphed adaptations into mass-produced merchandise and brand logos, we have all seen or at least “half seen” it (p. 52). We can recall, in one version or another, that arresting image of the giant wave crushing from above—as well as of the little men underneath at the mercy of nature’s roar, in an inverted world where Mt. Fuji has become but a dwarfed sight in the low distance. Simply known as “The Great Wave,” the work has become the single most recognized piece of Japanese art in the world.

How and why Hokusai’s print came to acquire this worldwide iconicity is the intriguing yet hitherto unexamined question Guth takes on in her recent book. Ingeniously written and immediately appealing to a wide range of readers from professional scholars and students to art lovers, it presents a cultural and social “biography” of Hokusai’s wave in a cross-disciplinary narrative that draws on “art and design history, anthropology, sociology, and media studies” (p. 8). Guth examines the manifold afterlives and reincarnations of Hokusai’s wave across time and place, introducing a wild array of cultural creations extending from celebrated masterpieces such as Debussy’s La Mer to little-known ephemera including wine labels, street art, and socks. Observing that this particular print has not gained the same celebrity status in Japan that it enjoys elsewhere, the author notes that “neither artistic intentionality nor intrinsic meanings can account for its success outside of its country of origin” (p. 7). As a matter of fact, the global iconicity of Hokusai’s wave is evidenced by the very fact that it can be cited “without explicit reference to Hokusai or to Japan.”

Guth’s study presents a concrete as well as conceptual model for a global cultural analysis that proposes an alternative to the concentrically hierarchical framework of center vs. peripheries and the concomitant original vs. copies. The author characterizes globalization as “a historically complex and contentious process of connectivity for which there is no singular definition or causal interpretation” (p. 4). She explores the nonlinear and multidirectional trajectories that have spun from “Under the Wave off Kanagawa” and “the networked relationship of its multisited appearances” (p. 4) [End Page 473] that have resulted in its worldwide celebrity as “The Great Wave,” emphasizing their inherent hybridity. Guth argues that Hokusai’s image, from its very inception, has been “a site where the tensions, contradictions, and, especially, the productive creativities of the local and the global have been negotiated and expressed” (p. 2). “The power of Hokusai’s design,” it turns out, “was its ability to enlist around it a huge range of mutable and often contradictory beliefs, aspirations, and symbolic meanings” (p. 96) that communicate local responses to “global interdependence” (p. 169).

Chapter 1 reevaluates the cultural attraction of “Under the Wave off Kanagawa” at the time of its original production in the late Edo period, when “growing preoccupation with the country’s shifting geopolitical circumstances and vulnerability to foreign incursions” heightened tensions along Japan’s coastal lines (p. 44). The prominent use of the exotic Berlin (or Prussian) blue, along with the inversion in the scale of Mt. Fuji and the wave through an exaggerated play on European one-point perspective, visualized the simultaneous fascination and fear...

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