Shunrō, 1779.

Sōri, 1795.

Hokusai, 1797.

Gakyō Rōjin Manji, "the Old Man Mad About Painting," 1834.

Those are four of the more than thirty names Katsushika Hokusai used across his lifetime, each one retired the moment he judged himself to have outgrown it. He moved house ninety-three times over ninety years, and by one account changed his name almost as often as his address.

In 1834, now going by Manji, seventy-five years old and already the most famous printmaker in Japan, he wrote a postscript to his book One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji. In it he stated plainly that until the age of 70, nothing I drew was worthy of notice. He then laid out a schedule for what remained. Real progress by eighty. A grasp of nature's underlying principles by ninety. Mastery by one hundred. And at one hundred ten, he wrote, every dot and every stroke he made would be alive.