EXHIBITIONS AND DISPLAYS

UKIYO-E: PICTURES OF A FLOATING WORLD

ELSJE NAGELKERKE

May 19, 2025

On a clear Tokyo morning in 2025, a foreigner stumbles into the world of ukiyo-e. It is not a history lesson, but a confrontation with color, paper, and impermanence. These were once souvenirs of pleasure and fame, sold for the price of a bowl of noodles. Now they reside in glass cases—fragments of a floating world that never expected to last.

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First, I noticed the light. A clear light, cold somehow, even in the middle of the day. Ueno Park holds that kind of light in the spring, just before the leaves come in thick enough to dim it. It’s a pale light, the kind that makes things seem more permanent than they are. You could almost forget you’re in Tokyo in 2025. You could be anywhere. You could be nowhere at all. Too much travel does this to you.

I hadn’t planned on visiting the museum that morning. I had planned on coffee. On killing time. On avoiding the jet lag I knew would hit me somewhere around noon. Still, I found myself buying a ticket. Still, I found myself inside the Tokyo National Museum, Ueno Park, Taitō ward. Founded in 1872. The kind of place that makes you aware of how little you actually know.

I moved past the cases of armor, the painted scrolls, the lacquered boxes. All of it beautiful. All of it heavy. The kind of history you are meant to admire at a distance. You keep your hands behind your back. You lower your voice. You try not to shift your weight too loudly on the museum floor.

And then, without warning, there it was.

The wave. 

Katsushika Hokusai, The Great Wave off Kanagawa, from the series Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, ca. 1830–32

I had not come for it. I had not thought of it in years. But there it was: The Great Wave off Kanagawa, printed sometime around 1831 by Katsushika Hokusai, who lived from 1760 to 1849. You already know the image. You have seen it in museum gift shops, on shower curtains, on coffee mugs, on mouse pads. I had seen it that way too. Flat. Reproduced. Weightless.

This was different.

The paper looked thin, as though it might not survive the next breath I took. The colors still held. The blue was deeper than I expected. The white sharper. Mount Fuji in the distance, small and certain.

I did not move on. I stayed. I stayed because the wave was not alone. The room stretched out in both directions, prints lined up like a scroll unraveling, endless. Women with hair piled high, faces pale as bone. Men with frozen mouths, wide eyes, one foot raised in a pose I did not understand. Bridges. Boats. Pine trees. Roads twisting like ribbons. Clouds that look like fish scales.

Utagawa Kuniyasu, Three Kabuki Actors Playing Hanetsuki, ca. 1823

It said ukiyo-e on the wall. Pictures of the floating world.

It took me longer than I like to admit to understand that this was not a metaphor.

Ukiyo, they explained, had once meant something else. The sorrowful world. A term for the temporary, the fragile, the fleeting. The idea that life was foam on a wave, here and gone.

But in Edo, beginning around 1603, the word changed. The meaning tilted, like a boat on a current. The sorrowful world became the floating world. The pleasure world. The world of kabuki theaters and teahouses, and courtesans. The world of a single night. The world that disappeared by morning. And e? Simply “pictures.”

These prints—these pictures—were souvenirs of that world.

They were not made for emperors. Not made for priests. They were made for the merchant class. People who could not wear silk or build temples, but who could hang a print on the wall. They bought them on the street. They bought them in bookshops. They bought them the way people now buy posters or postcards, or souvenir keychains.

They were mass-produced woodblock prints. You could buy one for the price of a bowl of noodles. You could buy ten without thinking twice. Many people did. 

Tōshūsai Sharaku, Kabuki Actor Ōtani Oniji III as Yakko Edobei, ca. 1794

The prints showed faces people already knew. Ichikawa Danjūrō V, the famous kabuki actor, born in 1741, died in 1806. Striking a pose no one strikes in real life, but in a pose, and with a face, that everyone recognized. The rock stars of their time. Others were sumo wrestlers. Courtesans. Long-necked women with hair like black lacquered sculpture. Their names are lost, mostly. The images outlasted the people.

There were the other prints to see, beyond a doorway with a sign above: “Mature Content.” Shunga. Erotic prints. But not rare, or hidden. One in every ten, they say. Some for education. Some for entertainment. Some for reasons we will never quite understand. I thought about the people who bought them. Young couples. Old monks. Curious strangers who lived their entire lives in a city that no longer exists. 

Suzuki Harunobu, Night Rain at the Double-Shelf Stand, from the series Eight Parlor Views, ca. 1766

Later, the artists began to look beyond the city and made landscapes. Bridges. Trees. Rivers. Mount Fuji again and again. Fuji as a dot. Fuji as a shadow. Fuji as a joke.

Hokusai printed Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji between 1830 and 1832. He was over seventy by then. He had changed his name more than thirty times. The wave was part of that series, but the series itself was larger than the wave.

Utagawa Hiroshige, born in 1797, died in 1858, followed with The Fifty-Three Stations of the Tōkaidō, first printed in 1833. You can follow the prints like a map, from Edo to Kyoto, station by station, rain by rain.

Utagawa Hiroshige, Shono, from the series The Fifty-Three Stations of the Tōkaidō, ca. 1833

The work was collaborative: the artist drew the design; the carver cut the woodblocks; the printer inked and pressed the sheets; the publisher paid for the whole thing. No one owned it alone.

By 1853, when Commodore Matthew Perry arrived with his black ships, the floating world had already begun to sink. The Meiji Restoration came in 1868. Oil painting. Photography. Modernization. The floating world became old-fashioned. The prints fell out of favor.

And so they left.

Wrapped around ceramics. Used as packing paper. Carried to Europe as protection for something else.

In Paris, they opened the boxes and found the prints. Bright. Strange. Unlike anything they knew. No shadows. No perspective. No depth. Only color. Only line. Only space broken in ways that seemed wrong until they seemed right.

A new word: japonisme.

Left: Utagawa Hiroshige, The Residence with Plum Trees at Kameido, from the series One Hundred Views of Famous Places in Edo, circa 1857

Right: Vincent van Gogh, Le Verger aux pruniers (The Plum Orchard), 1887

Edgar Degas copied the compositions. Claude Monet built a Japanese bridge in his garden in Giverny. Vincent van Gogh copied Hiroshige’s prints in oil paint—Le Verger aux pruniers (The Plum Orchard, 1887), Le Pont sous la pluie (The Bridge in the Rain, 1887). He said they made him happy. He said they made him see. Henri Toulouse-Lautrec made posters for Parisian cabarets that owed more to ukiyo-e than to anything French.

Gustav Klimt. Edvard Munch. James McNeill Whistler. They all looked East.

And yet, while they borrowed the surface, they missed the weight. The prints kept floating, even as the world that made them sank.

I should probably say it plainly: I’m not Japanese. I’m from Europe. A continent that exported philosophers and cathedral builders and, later, budget airlines. We didn’t have kabuki. We didn’t have geisha. We had cheap prints, yes, but mostly of hunting dogs and dead kings.

I didn’t grow up with Mount Fuji. I grew up with postcards of the Alps. I didn’t study Japanese art, not really. If I’m honest, I knew The Great Wave off Kanagawa the way most people know it—flattened onto a beach towel or stitched onto novelty socks. I would have guessed ukiyo-e was a kind of sushi if you’d asked me ten years ago. Maybe even five.

And so I stood there, an outsider, looking at the thing itself. Not the postcard, not the mug, but the paper, the print. The wave that had traveled further than the boats it tried to swallow.

I thought, not for the first time, that nothing ages faster than what once felt disposable. Some things only become beautiful when their time has already passed. I thought about how these prints had been packed away as trash, and how they had reappeared in Paris drawing rooms, in Amsterdam museums, in glass cases in Tokyo. I thought about how far things can drift when no one is paying attention.

And I thought about the word ukiyo. The floating world. Floating, because nothing stays. Floating, because everything moves. Floating, because this moment, too, is already gone.

Utagawa Hiroshige, Basho’s Hermitage and Camellia Hill on the Kanda Aqueduct at Sekiguchi, no. 40 in One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, ca. 1857

I left the museum. Walked down the stone steps, through Ueno Park, toward the city. The trees were losing their last petals. Someone was selling matcha soft-serve from a small pink truck. Somewhere nearby, I knew, someone was selling a print of that wave, folded in plastic, ready to go home with a stranger like me.

Elsje Nagelkerke (b. 1975 in Amsterdam) is a Dutch writer and confectioner known for making Japanese sweets that most people can’t pronounce and even fewer have heard of. She writes about objects that outlive their moment—whether paper, sugar, or reputation. She divides her time, often confusedly, between Amsterdam and Kanazawa.

Cover image: Utagawa Kuniyoshi, Zhang Shun, the White Streak in the Waves, ca. 1827–30