The giant wave’s foaming white summit spreads high over the heads of the helpless souls huddled in their long thin boats, crackling into what look like many sharp claws. It is a monster, hungry to swallow human flesh. But beyond it, over the wild water, soothing the terror of those in peril on the sea, is Mount Fuji – a solid cone of hope and solace.
The mountain, not the wave, is the hero of this masterpiece, as it is the hero of all the prints in Dulwich Picture Gallery’s stunning exhibition – the first in Britain – of the complete Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji. When you look closely here at three different, superb impressions of Katsushika Hokusai’s Under the Wave off Kanagawa – widely known today as the Great Wave – your mental picture of this icon is shattered by the violent onrush of water. In reproductions the wave just seems beautiful, an elegant curl of blue and white.
But here, to paraphrase Tennyson, it is nature, blue in tooth and claw. The wretched people are the emotional heart of the picture, their imminent risk of drowning its whole point. The wave is out of control, murderous, yet it is also a passing moment, shows Hokusai, a devout Buddhist.
He offers this consolation: the wave looks as vast as a mountain but soon it will break and be gone. Meanwhile the sacred peak of Mount Fuji endures eternally. It can’t be hurt by the ephemeral dragon of saltwater.
Put your faith in the essential, enduring things beyond the nightmare of mutable appearances and you will find inner peace. Yet that colossal truth is easy to forget as we move around it, pass it by, catch sight of it in the everyday rush – a distant peak on the horizon. On a city bridge people swarm without looking up from under their round hats at the mountain in the distance.
A man working bare-chested, wiry and worn, has no time to study the far-off peak as he concentrates on making a barrel. Hokusai delights in epic shifts of perspective, seeing Mount Fuji as an apparently small insignificant object while filling the foreground with distracting action. You do a double take at Fuji from Kanaya on the Tōkaidō Highway.
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