Day 178: Today's Pick — Hokusai's *Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji*

It is Christmas evening. The presents are open, the second pot of coffee is on the table, the dog has fallen asleep on whoever was foolish enough to sit down on the couch. You are, possibly, slightly tired of conversation. You want to do something with your eyes that is not a screen. You want to be quiet for a while.

This is the moment for which the Hokusai book exists.

I am referring to Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji — Fugaku Sanjūrokkei in Japanese — a series of color woodblock prints designed by Katsushika Hokusai in the early 1830s, published in installments over a few years, and consisting in fact of forty-six prints (thirty-six original, plus ten more added when the original series sold so well that the publisher demanded sequels). The most famous print in the series — The Great Wave off Kanagawa — is so widely reproduced as to be almost invisible. You have seen it. You probably have a coaster, a tote bag, a tea towel with it. Cool.

What you may not have seen, in any depth, are the other forty-five.

This is what the book is for. The series, taken as a whole, is one of the great achievements of Japanese woodblock printing — ukiyo-e, "pictures of the floating world." Hokusai was, by the time he made these, in his seventies. He had been making prints for fifty years. He had a single subject, Mount Fuji, and he treated it like a Cézanne with apples: the same mountain, again, again, in every weather, every season, every angle, every social condition. From a fishing village. From a paper-maker's courtyard. Through a barrel. Reflected in a lake. Behind a small army of pilgrims. From a beach in a thunderstorm. The whole project is a slow, joyful demonstration of how many ways a single image can be seen.

The Taschen XXL edition is the one I keep on the coffee table. It is roughly 13 by 17 inches, weighs about ten pounds, and reproduces the full forty-six plates at near full size on heavy uncoated paper. The accompanying essays — by Andreas Marks, who is one of the best living scholars of ukiyo-e — sit alongside each print and gently translate, contextualize, and point out details you would not otherwise notice. The whole package is, retail, $200; secondhand copies in good condition turn up for around $80. I would consider the Taschen edition the right "this is a serious book" gift for a thoughtful person on your list.

The smaller, paperback editions of the series — Dover, Yale, MoMA reprints — are fine but compromised; the prints are reduced and the paper does not do justice to the original Prussian-blue gradients that Hokusai pioneered. Save your money for the big book, or visit the prints in a museum (the Boston MFA and the Met both have rotating Hokusai displays).

What I want to say, having spent maybe twenty Christmas afternoons over the years with this book, is the following.

Hokusai's Fuji series rewards slow attention in a way most "great art" does not. The Great Wave is, of course, gorgeous, and the print justifies its fame. But the second-tier prints — the ones you don't have on a coaster — are the genuine ones. South Wind, Clear Sky (the so-called "Red Fuji") is, technically, a near-monochrome composition with three colors and a sky gradient that nobody had executed in this style before. The Lake of Hakone in Sagami Province has a small fishing boat on a flat green sea that, after looking at it for ten minutes, becomes the most peaceful image you've seen all year. Kajikazawa in Kai Province has a single fisherman on a rocky outcrop, his line invisibly thin, the mountain a small ghost in the distance, and the whole composition makes a triangular harmony that other artists are still trying to copy in 2025.

Spend a Christmas afternoon with this book. Then a Christmas afternoon next year. Then a Christmas afternoon the year after. The book is one of the small, slow, inexhaustible objects in a life. There is no reading-it-once. There is just sitting with it, pulling out a different print each year, and feeling — slightly — like you have looked at a thing.

Day 178. The pick is a mountain.