Miss Hokusai: Into the Archive

 

Miss Hokusai (2015) is an animated film following the fictionalized life of O-Ei, the daughter of Tetsuzo (the great artist known as Hokusai or “The Old Man Mad about Painting”) and takes place in 1814 Japan, during the Edo Period. She is a young painter herself and trying to improve her style while living and working with her father, who has a very great reputation (you’ve probably seen a copy of his ‘The Great Wave off Kanagawa’) but who cares little for fame or money, but only about perfecting his art. This is reflected in their living quarters, one in a series of shabby little studios, which, as they fill up with the detritus of their living, they can abandon and move on to cleaner apartments. “With two brushes and four chopsticks,” she claims, “We can live anywhere.”

Hokusai has divorced O-Ei’s mother to further concentrate on his art, but their relationship remains cordial. What concerns ‘Miss Hokusai’ more is his avoidance of his younger daughter, a little girl born blind. O-Ei puts this down to his fear of sickness, but as the story progresses there are hints that he believes he might be responsible for her lack of sight as karma for his superior artistic vision, and that he avoids the child out of guilt. O-Ei tries to make it up to the girl with loving attention and teaching but the child’s health continues to fail.

Meanwhile, ‘Miss Hokusai’ struggles with a perceived flaw in her painting. Although her style is so good that she can often finish Hokusai’s work without detection by casual viewers, many of her fellow artists see her depictions of male figures are weak. The general consensus is that she needs to take a lover. There are three contenders in the arena: a somewhat weedy protégé of her father’s who often visits the studio and specializes in erotic art has an interest in her (she doesn’t respect his work and outright ridicules him); a rising young artist whom she meets by accident on a bridge who pursues her like an awkward puppy; and a mature, smooth, established artist, kind but somewhat distant, who ties her tongue whenever she is in his presence. She even visits a brothel to try to solve her ‘problem’, but an encounter with a genial but single-minded male transvestite ends in something of an unfulfilling stalemate.

Besides these personal through-lines, there is a string of vignettes, a set of stories that emphasize the visionary, almost priest-like nature of Hokusai’s talent. He and his daughter live in an atmosphere of fire and shadow, where dragons, demons and ghosts move in and out of paintings and haunt the ‘real world’. O-Ei watches and learns as Hokusai solves spiritual problems with neither spells nor advice, but with talent and insight. The melancholy denouement of the film is a poignant weaving of the supernatural and the personal.

I first saw this movie on Netflix and knew I would like to have a copy. It has no insistent story but is made up of a series of quietly engaging scenes that add up to a single picture, like an Impressionist artwork or the many brush strokes of a Japanese painting. In the end it is gently satisfying and beautiful, and I have fallen in love with ‘Miss Hokusai’.