His works had a significant influence on Vincent van Gogh and Claude Monet during the wave of Japonisme that spread across Europe in the late 19th century.

In a long and successful career, Hokusai produced over 30,000 paintings, sketches, woodblock prints, and images for picture books in total.

Hokusai's date of birth is unclear, but is often stated as the 23rd day of the 9th month of the 10th year of the Hōreki era (in the old calendar, or 31 October 1760) to an artisan family, in the Katsushika[ja] district of Edo, the capital of the ruling Tokugawa shogunate (currently Katsushika-ku, Tokyo).

Shunshō was an artist of ukiyo-e, a style of woodblock prints and paintings that Hokusai would master, and head of the so-called Katsukawa school.

[5] Ukiyo-e, as practised by artists like Shunshō, focused on images of the courtesans (bijin-ga) and kabuki actors (yakusha-e) who were popular in Japan's cities at the time.

He produced many privately commissioned prints for special occasions (surimono), and illustrations for books of humorous poems (kyōka ehon) during this time.

During an Edo festival in 1804, he created an enormous portrait of the Buddhist prelate Daruma, said to be 200 square meters, using a broom and buckets full of ink.

[12] Another story places him in the court of the shōgun Tokugawa Ienari, invited there to compete with another artist who practised more traditional brushstroke painting.

Especially popular was the fantasy novel Chinsetsu Yumiharizuki (Strange Tales of the Crescent Moon, 1807–1811) with Minamoto no Tametomo as the main character, and Hokusai gained fame with his creative and powerful illustrations, but the collaboration ended after thirteen works.

His most famous image in this genre is The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife, which depicts a young woman entwined sexually with a pair of octopuses, from Kinoe no Komatsu, a three-volume book of shunga from 1814.

[18] By 1820, he had produced twelve volumes (with three more published posthumously) which include thousands of drawings of objects, plants, animals, religious figures, and everyday people, often with humorous overtones.

The feat was recounted in a popular song and he received the name "Darusen" or "Daruma Master"[20][21] Although the original was destroyed in 1945, Hokusai's promotional handbills from that time survived and are preserved at the Nagoya City Museum.

[25] It was at this time that he produced One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji, another significant series,[26] generally considered "the masterpiece among his landscape picture books".

[28] Hokusai's final print series, produced around 1835 to 1836, was called One Hundred Poems Explained by a Nurse (Hyakunin isshu tuba ga etoki).

At the age of 83, Hokusai traveled to Obuse in Shinano Province (now Nagano Prefecture) at the invitation of a wealthy farmer, Takai Kozan, where he stayed for several years.

[31] Between 1842 and 1843, in what he described as "daily exorcisms" (nisshin joma), Hokusai painted Chinese lions (shishi) every morning in ink on paper as a talisman against misfortune.

[32][33] Hokusai continued working almost until the end, painting The Dragon of Smoke Escaping from Mt Fuji[34] and Tiger in the Snow in early 1849.

[39] His influence stretches across the globe to his western contemporaries in nineteenth-century Europe with Japonism, which started with a craze for collecting Japanese art, particularly ukiyo-e.

Some of the first samples were to be seen in Paris, when in about 1856, the French printmaker, designer and colleague of many Impressionsist artists such as Édouard Manet,[40] Félix Bracquemond first came across a copy of a Hokusai sketchbook at the workshop of August Dalatre, his printer.

The Rousseau Service featured images of birds and fish copied from the Japanese book illustrations and placed asymmetrically against a white background for a look that would have been very modern at that time.

His woodcuts were collected by many European artists, including Degas, Gauguin, Klimt, Franz Marc, August Macke, Édouard Manet, and van Gogh.

The French composer Claude Debussy's tone poem La Mer, which debuted in 1905, is believed to have been inspired by Hokusai's print The Great Wave.

The composer had an impression of it hanging in his living room and specifically requested that it be used on the cover of the published score, which was widely distributed, and the music itself incorporated Japanese-inflected harmonies.

A 2011 book on mindfulness closes with the poem "Hokusai Says" by Roger Keyes, preceded with the explanation that "[s]ometimes poetry captures the soul of an idea better than anything else".