Katsushika Hokusai reached 70 and declared everything he had made before that age barely worth counting. This episode traces the life of the artist behind The Great Wave off Kanagawa, arguably the most reproduced image in art history, from his birth in 1760 east of Edo, painting at six, working in a bookshop at 12, and apprenticing as an engraver before joining the ukiyo-e master Katsukawa Shunsho at 18. We look at how ukiyo-e functioned as the commercialized pop art of its day, how Hokusai changed his professional name more than 30 times, and how a 2,600-square-foot portrait of Daruma painted with brooms made him a master of self-promotion.

The heart of the story is the cascade of disaster in the late 1820s: financial ruin, a probable stroke, the death of his wife, and a grandson's gambling debts that drove him to hide from creditors in a  ...