Hokusai Manga — a sketchbook plate

The grotesque and the humorous. Hokusai never shied from the strange, the ugly, or the absurd, and the Manga embraces the grotesque as readily as the beautiful. Its pages include the deformed and the monstrous, the comically fat and the alarmingly gaunt, human oddities and impossible hybrids, all drawn with unflinching relish. This taste reflects a broader Edo appetite for the peculiar and the sensational, but in Hokusai's hands the grotesque is never merely shocking — it is observed, structured, and often very funny. He found in exaggeration a way to test the limits of the human form and to puncture solemnity with laughter. The willingness to make images that are deliberately unlovely, that provoke a wince or a grin rather than admiration, marks these sketchbooks as something looser and more modern than conventional "fine" art. It is a sensibility of play and irreverence, and it points directly toward the comic freedoms that the medium bearing Hokusai's word would later claim as its birthright.