The story
In the main hall of this small museum in Obuse, a chestnut-growing town in Nagano, stand two wooden festival floats built for two of the town's own neighbourhoods. The thing to do is look up into them. Their ceiling panels were painted by Katsushika Hokusai, the master of The Great Wave, when he was in his mid-80s.
Hokusai made the long journey here from Edo, today's Tokyo, several times in the last years of his life. He was invited by Takai Kozan, a wealthy local merchant who wanted some of the city's culture in his own town and gave the old painter a studio on his estate. For the Higashimachi float, finished in 1844, Hokusai painted a dragon and a phoenix in scarlet and deep blue. For the Kanmachi float a year later he painted two panels of churning water, labelled the masculine wave and the feminine wave. Kozan himself coloured the carved frames around them from Hokusai's sketches.
The museum opened in 1976, largely to give these floats a safe home, and it shows Hokusai's prints and paintings in changing displays around them. Among its treasures is Dragon over Mount Fuji, a dragon rising in dark cloud past the snowy peak, dated to the first month of 1849. Hokusai died in Edo that spring, and the scroll is counted among the very last paintings he made.
