The Revelation of Katsushika Hokusai, The Artist

It seems as if everything is over, and the treacherous gods have won.

The world, once so lively, noisy, and melodious, is now gone, and dead silence reigns. However, the mother of the Universe, chained within the depths of Mount Fuji by the immortals-her husband and their monstrous children-still sings the eternal song of Woman, which lies at the core of everything and whose truth still echoes, despite everything the gods have done to silence it. No mortal can hear it except for the extraordinary child on whom the fate of the world now depends.

The child was born deaf, and his parents left him in the wild to die since, according to the repugnant laws of the gods, his very existence is blasphemous and cursed: the Law demands that people hear and obey. He survives-not by luck, but by the will of a mysterious legendary figure; a believer in the feminine principle who sets in motion a series of events that saves him from death and sends him into life with a purpose and the ability to achieve it. Without knowing how or why and guided by his instinct and the spirit of the mother goddess alive within him, the time comes when he must face the immortals.

The literary fantasy The Revelation of Katsushika Hokusai the Artist is set in a mostly mythical Japan and plays (as all myths do) with the archetypal forces that shape the path from darkness to light via dramatic conflict, imaginative fight scenes, and a story of love that reaches its purest expression in the form of the Goddess Izanami.

Besides narrating the story, a basic intention of the book is that its narrative 'voice' should energise the language, as Japanese lacquer does to objects, deepening it and giving it 'skin, flesh, and bones'. The book's illustrations by the award-winning artistic duo Kalos&Klio amalgamate this 'voice', beautifully translated to English from the original Greek by Steve Lever, with the manifestations of a visible soul.

George Georgiou studied fine arts, and has published two books in Greece: the novel Eternal Matter ((c)Armos, 2009); and the poetry Final Adam (self-published in Athens, 2002). He has also published poems (including a series of Haiku), many essays and short stories, the play Oedipus (2014), and the novel The Year of the Rat (2014) via his blog since 2009. He was a student and teacher of eastern and western martial arts for fifteen years.

For three years, (2012 - 2015), he was deeply involved with the 'Natural Method' of the Japanese philosopher and cultivator Masanobu Fukuoka and the principles of Permaculture, created by Bill Mollinson and David Holmgren. Accordingly, he created a small paradise in the foothills of the Vrontous mountain range and lived there in a caravan as a natural human being. His experiences of the mountain and nature, as well as the eternal evolutionary cycle of life and death, inspired The Revelation of Katsushika Hokusai the Artist.