Ukiyo-e master Hokusai established a tradition when he traveled around Mount Fuji in the 19th century, illustrating his 36 views of the mountain. He made it the locus of Japan, a prominence that was at once a symbol, not only of the country itself but also of all that was beautiful about it. Its serene slopes have defined Japanese style ever since and its distant regularity has inspired a deification of beauty.
Indeed, Fuji has grown more and more beautiful since Hokusai's time. This is because its elegant grace is always to be defined against the environment, the foreground of any such view. As this has become more and more cluttered, artificial and ugly, the natural splendor of the mountain has become more apparent.
Whether or not this occurred to photographer Chris Steele-Perkins, he has demonstrated it well in this playfully serious book on contemporary aspects of Fuji. He spent three years circling its base and his photographic record of these wanderings discovers a contemporary mountain, one still "a locus in a complex, modern society."
There it is, towering over the canned-drink dispensing machines in Fujinomiya. Again it looms over a car scrapyard in Gotemba, the rusting, useless machines describing something like the arc that defined the mountain in Hokusai's famous print of the big wave off Kanagawa.
Here again it stands, bizarre in back of the bound Gulliver in that now defunct theme-park in Asagiri. Refusing gentrification, it looms, raw and lovely, above its own fifth station, now cluttered with giant soft-creme cones, money-changing billboards, patriotic statues and the Imperial chrysanthemum.
Though it appears here once as its conventional self, framed by cherry blossoms off Izu, it is more often the ironic spectator at its own apotheosis. Seen reflected in a travel agent's window, it imposes itself behind the Champs Elysees. Again reflected in the glass of a Lake Kawaguchi onsen, it defines the bathers, just as did all those painted Fujis in the now-vanished sento of Japan.
This disconcerting and intriguing mixture of old Japan and new Fuji is accentuated by the way the photographer has arranged his pictures in terms of the four seasons -- just like those innumerable photo books innocently devoted to "Beautiful Japan." There is a further spatial movement, since we slowly approach the mountain through these pages and end on top of it. There we find the cluttered lunar landscape of the crater, the huddled clumps of frozen climbers. And at the end he lets us loose with a vast picture of Fuji's shadow covering Kanto, the mountain itself evaporated.
The book is at once a social commentary, a homage to Hokusai, an ironic essay on modernity and a testimony to a standard of aesthetic beauty that resists both beaux-arts and the retro boom. This mixture creates the attractively tart flavor of this collection -- sweet and sour blended with a light skill that prevents its being bitter.
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