The composition centres on a huge wave about to break over three fast boats used to carry fish from the Izu and Boso peninsulas to the markets of Edo, each rowed by eight men clinging to their oars with two passengers seated in the bow^[1]. The wave's claw-like crests dominate the picture, and Hokusai used perspective so that a smaller wave in the foreground, shaped like a miniature Fuji, appears larger than the real, distant mountain behind it, a visual joke that reinforces the picture's real subject: the overwhelming scale of the sea set against the calm permanence of the mountain^[1].

Hokusai built the print from a tightly controlled range of colours: three distinct shades of blue for the water, yellow for the boats, dark grey for the sky behind Fuji and the lower boat, a paler grey for the sky above the mountain and the foreground boat, and pink clouds glowing around the peak itself, with a dark outline around Fuji suggesting the light of early morning^[1]. The blues that give the print its now-instantly recognisable tone combine traditional indigo with Prussian blue, a chemical pigment that had only recently become available in Japan when Hokusai began the series in his seventies^[1].

The Great Wave belongs to Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, a series Hokusai began at around seventy years old and later expanded with ten further prints while keeping the original title, so that the completed set actually runs to forty-six views^[1]. Across the series, Fuji appears in a wide variety of roles, sometimes as the dominant subject, sometimes as a small, steady presence in the background, as in the Great Wave, where the mountain's permanence is set deliberately against the sea's violent unpredictability.