Every February in Japan, at the festival of Setsubun, families throw roasted soybeans out the door and shout Oni wa soto, fuku wa uchi: demons out, luck in. Katsushika Hokusai, the artist best known for The Great Wave, made a print around 1807 that sets the two sides of that ritual face to face, a fierce demon mask and a cheerful goddess mask.
The goddess is Uzume, who in the oldest Japanese myths saved the world with a dance. When the sun goddess Amaterasu hid in a cave, plunging the world into darkness, Uzume danced and laughed on an overturned tub until the other gods roared with laughter. Curious about the noise, Amaterasu peeked out and light returned. Uzume's round, smiling face became the model for the mask of the good-luck figure called Okame or Otafuku.
The Oni are the demons of folklore, horned and tusked ogres who bring sickness and misfortune. In the print the two masks sit together, and they are not drawn as enemies. They look more like old companions, and the pairing may carry a New Year's joke.
This was a surimono, a special type of print that was commissioned privately, usually for poetry societies and New Year greetings, rather than for the open market. They were printed in small runs on fine paper, with metallic pigments, embossing and subtle color, and they carried poems alongside the pictures, as this one does in its columns of calligraphy.
The result is small, witty and elegant. Hokusai's genius was to make the sublime and the funny share a single sheet.
Hokusai's Masks of Oni and Uzume appears on our: