Hokusai Reborn

Bringing Hokusai's unpublished drawings to life!

The Great Picture Book of Everything

As part of their annual creation of sets of woodblock prints available by subscription, Dave Bull's Mokuhankan workshop in Asakusa, Tokyo, created a project during 2023~2024 in collaboration with the British Museum, in London.

The Museum has in their possession a group of drawings by Hokusai that were apparently intended for use in the production of a series of books. For reasons unknown to us now that project was cancelled, but the drawings survived, and we selected 12 of them for a subscription series.

For more details of the collection of images, please refer to this page of the British Museum website. But here, we can simply note that the drawings fall into a number of categories, and our set reflects that diversity. Hokusai's series was intended to take his readers through aspects of Japanese historical culture, and we meet Buddhist deities, warriors from ancient China, and historical landscapes, along with more prosaic scenes of the natural world.

The prints are 13.5 x 18.5 cm in format (slightly larger than 5 x 7 inches), and have been made on a thin version of our usual hosho washi, made in the workshop of Iwano Ichibei.

We hope you will consider collecting this interesting set of prints, and travelling with us through Hokusai's 'Book of Everything'! [Subscription page]

The Production Team

There is a very interesting aspect to this project that is very different from our previous work. These new prints are not 'reproductions', in the sense that they are freshly carved versions of something that was already carved years ago. Our team worked directly from the drawings, something very unfamiliar to craftsmen these days.

A group of our carvers worked together on this project: Dave, his co-worker Chon-san (who carved the most recent two designs in the Eight Views series), and Taran Casey, a young man from Wales who is here in Tokyo studying with Mr. Motoharu Asaka. These three did four designs each (from the four overall themes represented in this set: Chinese legends, early Asian Buddhism from India, the natural world, and 'miscellany') and each brought their own 'taste' to the designs - a natural consequence of the production process.

The Set of Prints ...

Print #1: 'Buddhist Deity on Dragon'

Print #2 : 'The Old Tree at Konomine'

Print #3 : 'Rivers of Sand'

Print #4 : 'Cats and Hibiscus'

Print #5 : 'Seizing the Moon'

Print #6 : 'Peacock and Phoenix'

Print #7 : 'In Distant Lands'

Print #8 : 'A Bevy of Birds'

Print 9 : 'Buddhist Guardians'

Print 10 : 'Liu Bang Beheads the Snake'

Print 11 : 'Virudhaka Dies by Lightning'

Print 12 : 'Queen Mother of the West'

Storage/Display

"How do I store my prints? How can I display them? Do I need to buy frames?" are some of the questions we receive about our subscription print sets, and after much experimentation and research, we have the answer to all those questions in one neat package - our combination storage/display box (shown at the top of this page).

The box is an optional purchase - typically ordered together with the first print in the set, but also available later as an 'add-on' option. Each box has room for the complete set of 12 prints in this series, and incorporates a display stand with acrylic dustcover. Rotate the prints frequently (and don't place it where direct sunlight will fall on the print surface), and you have the perfect solution for both long-term storage, and daily enjoyment of your collection! Here is a page with more photos and complete information.

The Mokuhankan update video that first introduced the series:

We hope you will consider collecting this interesting set of prints!