Doak Cox and the Woodcut

The thing about a mirror is that it shows you only an exact replica of what used to be. It is the fluid record of the death of the present played back at the speed of light. It is the image from a camera’s viewfinder that never becomes a snapshot. When we look to a mirror to see who we are, it shows us who we were just a moment ago.

His name from childhood is Tokitaro. His name is Shunro, then it is Taito, then it is Iitsu. It is Gakyo Rojin Manji, which means “The Old Man Mad about Art.” He is an artist, and each time he makes a major shift in his artistic style, he changes his name. Now his name is Hokusai. Hokusai’s father made mirrors and taught him an appreciation for elegance. As a young boy, he watched as his father painted intricate designs around mirrors and then mimicked the craft.

Seventy-year-old Hokusai dips his brush into a vial of black ink. His movements are controlled and deliberate. Beneath his bald and neatly creased forehead, Hokusai’s dark eyes squint severely at the page. He places the tip of his brush on the edge of the page and sweeps upward toward the center. He is tracing a curve. His brush jets back and forth in short, precise movements. His painted curls and dips are the grasping fingertips of a frothy wave. He has painted this wave before. This is the thirty-seventh and final draft of his Great Wave.

Hokusai has been dead for ninety-seven years. In another forty-five a crater on Mercury will be given his name. It is 1946. On April 1 an earthquake off the coast of Alaska sparks a tsunami in the Pacific Ocean. The tsunami hurtles toward Hawaii more than three thousand miles from the quake’s epicenter. It reaches the Big Island in five hours and announces its arrival with a roar. It breaks over Pier 1 in Hilo Bay harbor, knocking people into the water. The first wave towers thirteen stories over the Hawaiian coast. A trail of smaller waves bursts from the ocean in every direction, killing dozens in its path, which stretches from Alaska to South America. A person in Santa Cruz, California, drowns. Fishing boats sink off the coast of Chile. In Hawaii alone, 159 people were killed by the tsunami.

Days later, geophysicist Doak Cox scratches neat equations on a pad in his office. A cigarette burns short in the ashtray on his desk. Cox scratches his head unconsciously as he considers data from the earthquake and subsequent tsunami. Like the long equations he writes to explain otherwise inexplicable phenomena, he speaks in long sentences, stringing out clause after clause, chasing the strain of his imagination through ebbs and flows, drawing breathless conclusions.

The United States government asks Cox to join a scientist from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and another from the University of Hawaii in the first post-tsunami survey ever conducted.

Each time I visit the Art Institute of Chicago, I pause in front of Hokusai’s Great Wave. The crashing wave frames Mount Fuji, dwarfed in the background of the image. Mount Fuji’s snowy peak is as white and clean as the threatening crest of the wave on the Pacific Ocean. The outermost ringlet of foam points directly to the mountain from above, as though poised to devour it. Nearly lost in the image are the boats. The viewer is meant to look first at the giant cresting wave, and then to the mountain safely nestled in the distance. I must have stood in front of the print fifty times before I saw the fishing boats. The boats and their crews of twelve men dressed in the same blues and whites of the ocean bow their bald heads toward the water. They strain against their oars and paddle for shore or for calmer waters, whichever they find first. Their long boats are built for speed to transport their catch. Fresh bonito was a prized delicacy and promised a payday worth the...