1836
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Poem by Minamoto no Muneyuki from the series One Hundred Poems by One Hundred Poets Explained by the Nurse is a 1836 by Katsushika Hokusai, a Romanticism work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
A lone figure trudges up a snowy mountain path, a straw hat hiding their face. Bare trees claw at the sky, and a tiny village clings to the slope below. Hokusai didn’t just illustrate the poem—he played with it. The print shows a nurse’s silly take, missing the poem’s quiet sadness. Instead of loneliness, we get a clumsy traveler in a blizzard, as if the nurse mixed up the words. To see how real poetry prints looked, search *japan, edo period (1615–1868)*.
Katsushika Hokusai designed this print series from the perspective of a confused nurse attempting to illustrate classical poetry but missing the subtle allusions. This interpretation creates what would have been considered a comical disconnect between poem and image. The poem on this print reads as follows: In the mountain village, it is in winter that my loneliness increases most, when I think of how both have dried up, the grasses and people’s visits. —Translation by Joshua Mostow While nobleman Minamoto no Muneyuki (died 939) wrote of dying grasses, the nurse imagines instead a lively…
This impression of Hokusai's print has a fold along its center, indicating that it may have once been placed in an album of the book format.
Read the full account in the museum source.
Katsushika Hokusai spent his life in Edo, now Tokyo, where he drew and carved prints for a living.
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