Katsushika Ōi (about 1800–after 1857), Hua Tuo Operating on the arm of Guan Yu. Hanging scroll, ink and colour on silk, 1840s. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Kelvin Smith Fund 1998.178 Hokusai clearly intended to create a book that basically enabled travels of the mind at a time when people in Japan could not travel abroad,” Frank Feltens, an assistant curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art, tells Atlas Obscura. “It captures his incredible powers of creativity, fusing what he saw around himself but also what he had in his own imagination.”

Smith, Henry D. II (1988). Hokusai: One Hundred Views of Mt. Fuji. New York: George Braziller, Inc., Publishers. ISBN 978-0-8076-1195-1. Goncourt, Edmond de (2014). Hokusai Mega Square. Bournemouth, Parkstone International. ISBN 978-1-78310-566-3.He was not only talented but also highly professional: he could draw with any tools, in any scales, using any media (paints, ink, pencils, whatever). Imagine this performance of him:

Machotka, Ewa (2009). Visual Genesis of Japanese National Identity: Hokusai's Hyakunin Isshu. Peter Lang. ISBN 978-90-5201-482-1.Brown, Kendall H. (13 August 2007). "Hokusai and His Age: Ukiyo-e Painting, Printmaking and Book Illustration in Late Edo Japan (review)". The Journal of Japanese Studies. 33 (2): 521–525. doi: 10.1353/jjs.2007.0048. ISSN 1549-4721. S2CID 143267375.