BD. Edmund Blunden

130. Review of Modern English Studies: In Honour of Professor Rintarô Fukuhara; Where Two Cultures Meet, by Junesay Iddittie; Hokusai, by Ichitarô Kondô, and Hokusai: Paintings, Drawings, and Woodcuts, by J. Hillier. Journal of Oriental Studies 3 (1956 [i.e, January 1958]): 147-48, 362-63.

Fukuhara (Ap) ‘well  . . . merits the tribute conveyed in so copious and . . . thoughtful a volume’; Iddittie observes the ‘symptoms’ of mutual influence between Japan and the United States; Kondô ‘succeeds in showing . . . not only the force but the range’ of Hokusai (Ap); and Hillier’s ‘general portrait’ of that artist is ‘wise and humane’. Regarding Blunden’s own view of Hokusai, he finds his ‘depth of genius and shaping spirit of imagination’ more profound than those of Hiroshige (Ap), and returns to an old habit of finding comparisons between England and Japan (see 3, 12, 26, 42a, and 71o, for example) in noting that ‘there was something of . . . Turner, [and] . . . Cruikshank in him’.