UAL-012
DRAFT
Katsushika Hokusai
1760–1849 · age 88
Drawing continued into the ninth decade
Painter; print designer · Japan · LATE LIFE
This record is in draft. Documentation is incomplete. Modes are analytical, not verdicts. UNKNOWN is left in place wherever the evidence cannot support more.
01 Event
EVENT
Hokusai worked as a designer of ukiyo-e into old age. Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, including Under the Wave off Kanagawa, belongs to his seventies. He died in 1849, still identified as a working artist.
02 Mortality encounter
MORTALITY ENCOUNTER
Mortality is visible as aging and as the artist’s own published wish to keep drawing further into extreme old age. No medical crisis is required for finitude to be named.
03 What continued?
WHAT CONTINUED?
Only documented behavior.
- Print series and paintings continued in the 1830s and 1840s.
- Name-changes and studio practice continued rather than a documented withdrawal from making.
04 STATED
STATED
What the subject explicitly said.
From the age of six I had a mania for drawing the forms of things… If I go on, at one hundred and ten everything I do, be it a dot or a line, will be alive.
05 OBSERVED
OBSERVED
What can be directly established from sources.
Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji was issued around 1830–1833, when Hokusai was in his seventies.
He died in Edo in 1849, aged eighty-eight by common reckoning.
06 INFERENCE
INFERENCE
A clearly marked analytical interpretation.
The colophon states a desire to keep making. It does not prove that drawing was the meaning of life. MADE is therefore provisional.
Analytical note
07 Temporal trace
TEMPORAL TRACE
1831
mortality
Late-life printmaking; age itself named in the work’s horizon
OBSERVED
1831
continuation · CREATE
Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji in circulation
OBSERVED
1849
death
Died in Edo
OBSERVED
1849
remainder · CREATE
Prints remain in collections worldwide
OBSERVED
Continuation distance
CONTINUATION DISTANCE
From the point at which mortality became visible to the last documented act. Time is only one axis. Some lines stop. Some cross death as remainder, which is not an afterlife.
- Visible
- 1831
- Last documented act
- 1831
- Distance
- 0 months · 216 to death
CREATE
crosses death → remainder
Vertical mark = documented death. Lines after that mark are inheritance, not survival of the person.
08 What remained?
WHAT REMAINED?
Documented continuation after the person's death: works, institutions, relationships, recordings, texts, systems or influence. This is not described as an afterlife.
works
Prints and paintings remain. Remainder is material.
Provenance
Museum catalogues and standard art-historical biography. The well-known colophon about drawing until one hundred and ten is treated as STATED aspiration, not as a verified inner metaphysics.
Confidence MEDIUM · Observed 2026-09-21 · SECONDARY
Nineteenth-century sources are thinner than contemporary journalism. Confidence is MEDIUM. UNKNOWN remains attached.