Short answers, pulled from the story.
Hokusai was a Japanese ukiyo-e artist of the Edo period, active as a painter and printmaker. He is best known for the woodblock print series Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, which includes The Great Wave off Kanagawa. He helped transform ukiyo-e from portraits of courtesans and actors into a broader art focused on landscapes, plants, and animals.
Hokusai's date of birth is often stated as the 31st of October 1760, in the Katsushika district of Edo, the capital of the Tokugawa shogunate. He died on the 10th of May 1849 at the age of 88, and was buried at the Seikyō-ji temple in Tokyo.
The Great Wave off Kanagawa is Hokusai's most celebrated print, part of Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji produced in the early 1830s. In it Hokusai used a western-style perspective to represent depth and volume, drawing on the studies he had developed in his Manga.
Hokusai was known by at least thirty names during his lifetime, more than any other major Japanese artist. Changing names was common among Japanese artists of his era, but his changes were so frequent and so tied to shifts in his style that scholars use them to divide his life into periods. His final name, Gakyō Rōjin Manji, means 'The Old Man Mad About Art'.
Hokusai influenced European art during Japonism, the craze for collecting Japanese art that began in the mid-19th century. His prints were collected by Degas, Gauguin, Klimt, Manet, and van Gogh, and his work influenced Claude Monet and the Impressionists. Composer Claude Debussy kept a print of The Great Wave and is believed to have drawn on it for his tone poem La Mer in 1905.
Over a long career, Hokusai produced more than 30,000 paintings, sketches, woodblock prints, and picture-book images. He began painting around the age of six and continued working almost until his death at 88, including The Dragon of Smoke Escaping from Mt Fuji and Tiger in the Snow in early 1849.