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Hokusai . By Matthi Forrer, including text by Edmond de Goncourt. New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 1989. 399 pp. $85.00.

In his latest book on Hokusai, Matthi Forrer has made the rather surprising and unfortunate decision to imbed the entire text of Edmond de Goncourt's pioneering Hokousai of 1896 within his own. Hokusai's career is divided, legitimately, into six chronological sections following the major changes in his use of art name; these changes marked new directions in his art and, to a certain extent, his audience. In each section Forrer quotes the relevant passages from de Goncourt and then supplies his own comments, amendments, and additions, summarizing the intervening one hundred years of scholarship. These parallel, alternating texts are illustrated with a large number of generally well-selected color (100) and black-and-white (500) photographs of books, prints, drawings, and a few paintings. One can only assume that Forrer was pressured in some way to adopt this complex structure by the publishers Flammarion, who issued the French edition of Forrer's new work. Surely no authors would voluntarily saddle themselves with such a textual and editorial nightmare. As a specialist reader I am very grateful to have, in the edition published simultaneously by Rizzoli in New "York, an admirable translation into English of Goncourt's historically important work. But I suspect that the reader with a more general interest in Japanese art will find the inconsistencies between the two texts bewildering and the duplications unnecessary. Forrer states in the foreword that "misprints have been corrected" (p. 7) in Goncourt's text, but if so then the subsequent editing and proofreading have been appalling, for misprints abound. The kind of inconsistencies that occur between the two texts can be illustrated by the different readings given for a single book title: Otoko doka (Forrer, p. 52) va. Dan toka (Goncourt, p. 53)—for a reader who does not know Japanese these must seem like two separate books. The original pages 61-64 of Goncourt's book are inexplicably reprinted twice. Setting aside such annoying mistakes, what are the values and relative merits of the two texts? For his time, de Goncourt was remarkably thorough. He used a translation of the best available Japanese biography, Iijima Kyoshin's Katsushika Hokusai den (Tokyo: Kobayashi Bunshichi, 1893); he studied carefully the large collection of Hokusai material amassed by the Japanese dealer Hayashi Tadamasa (1851-1906); and he also picked the latter's brains, hailing Hayashi in his preface as "my erudite collaborator" (p. 370). However, too much of de Goncourt's text is pure description of surimono, kibyoshi, and yomihon—a kind of glorified collector's handbook. Forrer does a valiant job to track down illustrations of some of these (de Goncourt's original book had precious few pictures). De Goncourt was assiduous in translating Hokusai's prefaces and lively letters, and one wishes Forrer would provide a note directing us to the originals so that the translation (Japanese-French-English) could be checked. As a connoisseur of surimono and scholar of prints, Forrer is well placed to bring us up to date with recent Hokusai scholarship, and in general his text is most useful when doing things like using publishers' advertisements in books to suggest dates for series of single sheet prints, etc. The weakest aspect of his text is the almost total lack of a discussion of Hokusai's paintings. After the publication of Narazaki Muneshige's scholarship on Hokusai in 1982 and the marvelous exhibition organized by Nagata Seiji at the Ota Museum in Tokyo in 1985, no one can be in any doubt whatsoever that Hokusai—like Rembrandt and Goya—was a great and innovative painter, as well as a great and innovative print designer.