Riding Hokusai’s wave

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 25/03/2023 (1161 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

You know that thing where once you notice something, you start noticing it everywhere?

I’ve been having it lately with Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa.

This Japanese woodblock print, from 1831, is among the world’s most reproduced images, so I’ve probably seen it before and so have you (probably). But seeing isn’t necessarily the same thing as noticing, and it feels like Hokusai’s wave — at once frothy and foreboding, rendered in blues that range from seafoam to midnight, capped by a curling, claw-like spume — is following me around.

I first noticed it as part of the cover design for Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, the gorgeous 2022 novel by Gabrielle Zevin. Hokusai’s wave is central to the novel, which is about game designers, yes, but it’s also about making art, finding inspiration, and borrowing old ideas to create new ones.

I read that book in January. Not long after, I flipped the square on my page-a-day calendar by Liz + Mollie — a.k.a. Liz Fosslein and Mollie West Duffy, whose truth-bomb illustrations about work, burnout, and hustle culture have been a lifeline, particularly during the pandemic — and there it was again: this time reimagined as Hokusai’s Wave of Anxiety. I have that one tacked up on my cubicle wall.

I noticed it a third time, on my phone. The emoji for “wave” bears a striking resemblance to Hokusai’s.

Then a fourth, in the curvature of this weird blue neck stretcher thing I was Instagram influenced into buying during the pandemic in an attempt to correct my Body By Laptop. (That one’s a bit abstract, maybe, but I like the idea that its curl is the result of some product designer once seeing Hokusai’s print and it getting stuck in their brain).

There’s some debate about whether Hokusai was depicting a tsunami, or just a really big wave. Mount Fuji is visible in the background, but made tiny by the water. Three boats are held in the wave’s bracket, the harrowing moment before it would crash down on them.

If that’s not a metaphor for how the last three years have felt, I don’t know what is. The pandemic was, at one point, even measured in waves — waves that would crest, then recede, then crest again. And, if you were lucky, your boat would make it.

Anxiety is often measured in waves. So is pain. But sometimes you can ride a wave, like a thrill-seeking surfer who purposefully seeks them out. Catching a wave is good fortune, success; to ride its crest is to be right at the height. Waves can be destructive. They can also be beautiful.

This sensation of noticing once, then noticing everywhere has a term: frequency illusion, or the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. Our brains are hardwired to seek patterns; it’s one of the things that helps us learn.

Hokusai’s wave is obviously not literally following me around; it just feels like it is. That’s the thing about enduring, inspiring artworks — they are borrowed, riffed on, and suffused with new meaning because they continue to be noticed.

I’m curious: what are some things you started seeing everywhere after seeing them for the first time?

This column first appeared in Jen Zoratti’s newsletter, Next, a weekly look at a post-pandemic future. Sign up at: wfp.to/jennext

jen.zoratti@freepress.mb.ca