Among his best-known works are the 13-volume sketchbook Manga (which means "Random Sketches" and begun 1814), as well as the series of block prints known as the Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji (circa 1826-33). This picture is from that sketchbook.

Japanese artists, as their Chinese counterparts, sign their work with seals (stamps) which make use of Chinese calligraphic characters. Artists were fond of adopting many different names related to a current style. Hokusai used over twenty different names during his career. The inscription above the seal reads: "Sakino Hokusai Iitsu ga"

This picture was adopted for the cover picture of the first edition of "The Sea"("La mer,Trois esquisesymphoniques") by Claude Debussy (1862-1918), published in 1905.

"This is a seascape with Mt. Fuji. The waves form a frame through which we see Mt. Fuji. Hokusai loved to depict water in motion: the foam of the wave is breaking into claws which grasp for the fishermen. The large wave forms a massive yin to the yang of empty space under it. The impending crash of water brings tension into the painting. In the foreground, a small peaked wave forms a miniature Mt. Fuji, which is reflected hundreds of miles away in the enormous Mt. Fuji, which shrinks through perspective; the wavelet is larger than the mountain. Instead of shoguns and nobility, we see tiny fishermen huddled into their sleek crafts; they slide down a seamount and dive straight into the wave to make it to the other side. The yin violence of Nature is dismissed by the yang relaxed confidence of expert fishermen. Oddly, though it's a sea storm, the sun is shining." (<http://www.andreas.com/hokusai/>)

As one would expect, the concept was so important that Hokusai would not stop at a single picture of the waves. There is another woodblock entitled "Fuji Seen From the Sea," created in 1834 in the series "A Hundred Views of Mt. Fuji". There are no humans in the picture; instead, the wave breaks into a foam which, in turn, breaks up into a flock of birds. As in Esher's pictures the wave is dispersing itself into the wind as flying-away birds. Although, without the boats and the proportions of the other Great Wave, this work is not as dramatic, the power and the tension of the sea is drawn out through lines which grow up the side of the wave.

Hokusai's works were collected in Paris in the mid-19th century, especially by such impressionist artists as Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, and Henri Toulouse-Lautrec.