Under the skin
The murdered actor Kohada Koheiji looks like a zombie in Hokusai’s spooky print. He’s imagined as a skeleton with skin and hair still clinging to his skull. Though pictured as flesh and bone, however, this is a vision of a spectre, from the series One Hundred Ghost Tales.
Totally swamped
Freud would surely have approved of the humdrum everyday setting, which lends the image its uncanny shock: the ghost is pulling back a mosquito net to give his wife and her lover a nasty wake-up call. The pair have done him in and dumped his body in a swamp, according to a story that did the rounds in the 18th century.
Lights out
Hokusai’s prints of frothed and frozen waves and horny giant squid are the stuff of art legend. His ghosts and demons are slightly less well known. This series played to the age-old pastime of telling ghost stories, which in Japan included blowing out a lantern flame, providing a bit of darkness in which a phantom could (hopefully) appear.
Funny bones
With his googly eyes and toothy grin, Hokusai’s Kohada Koheiji seems designed to induce shrieks of laughter as much as fright: a classic mix of comedy and horror.
Hokusai: Beyond The Great Wave, British Museum, WC1, to 13 August
