Hokusai Manga — a sketchbook plate

Gods, demons, and the supernatural. The Manga moves freely between the observed and the imagined, and its pages of deities, ghosts, and monsters are among its most memorable. Drawing on Buddhist and Shinto iconography as well as folklore, Hokusai rendered thunder gods, long-nosed tengu, shape-shifting spirits, and grimacing demons with the same confident line he gave to farmers and sparrows. The supernatural gave him license for the extreme — bulging muscles, wild hair, contorted faces, bodies stretched or swollen beyond nature — while still obeying an inner anatomical logic that makes the impossible convincing. This appetite for the fantastic, sitting cheek by jowl with scenes of daily life, is thoroughly characteristic of the sketchbooks and prefigures the boundless subject matter of later manga. Hokusai treated the invisible world as simply another realm to be observed and catalogued, drawing its inhabitants with the same matter-of-fact vitality he brought to the streets of Edo.