Poem by Tenchi Tennō

This print is one of 27 designs Hokusai completed from a planned series of 100, each illustrating a poem from the classical Hyakunin isshu anthology compiled by Fujiwara no Teika in 1235. The poem depicted here — the first in the anthology — is attributed to Emperor Tenji (r. 661–668) and describes peasants harvesting rice in autumn, their sleeves wet with dew. Hokusai intended to visualize not the poems themselves but the scenes and settings that a nurse might conjure to explain them to children, giving him wide imaginative latitude. Publication began around 1835 under the Edo publisher Nishimura Yohachi (Eijudo), who issued the first five designs; the remaining prints were published by Iseya Sanjiro (Iseri). The series was left unfinished — the Tenpō famine of 1833–36 is thought to have disrupted commercial publishing sufficiently to halt production at 27 designs. Multiple impressions survive in institutional collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art.