The Ghost Brush (103 page)

I WENT HOME SLOWLY
along our street with my packages. The wind whipped at the laundry—little children’s shirts—that was strung on poles. The wild cats were out prowling for fishbones. The always curious neighbours squinted at me. One woman was at the well, raising a bucket by the pulley wheel. She pulled it towards her while the wind pushed it away. All of these details were clear in my mind.

A young woman knelt in front of a fulling block with her pounding tool raised high. Whump, whump, it went as she brought it down time and again on the cloth stretched over the block in front of her. She looked purposeful and even happy. Her baby sat propped in his bucket beside her. A larger child sat on the edge of the house swinging her feet over the mud.

Von Siebold names no one, I thought. I believed it: the man had character. But there were our paintings. Not signed, but perhaps recognizable as by Hokusai. Would we too be arrested?

The woman beckoned me. “There was a big noise from your rooms,” she whispered.

My heart thumped.

“There was?” I said. I suddenly had no feeling.

“A man came out running,” she whispered. “I haven’t seen your father since.”

Our screen had been left open. I stepped up. The wind was stirring the old bamboo-leaf food wrappers scattered on the floor. My father was on his elbows and knees with his bottom in the air, peering at a painting on the floor.

“Old Man?” I said. “Did you have a visitor?”

He did not reply. I saw that his hands were not moving. He was just propped there. I stuck my toe into his side. He did not move.

“Hokusai!”

He toppled over sideways.

Everything went black. I must have called for help: the neighbour sent her children for water while she ran to the apothecary. I held my father’s head in my lap.

I waited for hours for a sound. Then he called for his shochu. He drank the potato liquor and pretended nothing was wrong. He said that he was sleeping, and what was the problem? But I knew who had been there.

T
he orphan son of my sister O-Miyo and Shigenobu had progressed from being a bully to being a gangster. True, he had learned from a master: his father had beaten my sister with his fists while she was making the evening meal. The boy had clung to his mother’s kimono while Shigenobu threw cooking pots at the walls. He had forced O-Miyo to stand outside in the cold while he and his cronies sat around the
kotatsu
drinking. The boy’s name was Shigeshiro. My father mumbled excuses: his parents had divorced.

“So what?” I used to say to him.

And he had come to us before, several times at this address.

My name for him was Monster Boy. Every time he showed up and stamped on our tatami with his dirty sandals, my father greeted him with a face wreathed in smiles and a handful of money. He loved him. Loved him silly. Never stopped.

“Old Man, beloved old father. Hokusai,” I warned, “you are a fool. He is going to throw that money away after we work all day and half the night to earn it. He is the Leech Child.” That was a figure of myth. He was born of deities but had to be cast out because of his actions.

That was the last time Monster Boy came.

“Yes, but you see,” said Hokusai triumphantly, “look what became of the Leech Child. He was transformed. He is worshipped as Ebisu, one of the Seven Lucky Gods.”

“Well, I don’t think this one will be.”

“He is a good boy. You must have patience.”

I put my head in my hands. My father was so stubborn.

“I am going to set him up as a fishmonger.”

“Old Man, you’re dreaming. He won’t do one day of honest work.”

“Ei is a hard woman.” He stared into the air as if speaking to an ancestor. “She hoards my money.”

“You forget that it’s my money too. I mixed the pigment. I painted the bridge and the cherry trees myself. I designed the women.”

But I was not to mention these inconvenient facts.

“The apprentices will do the work if you don’t wish to,” he muttered, shuffling out to make water behind the tenements.

“You forget we have no apprentices at the moment!”

The young man had come back only hours later.

“We have nothing for you,” I said.

“You have nothing, izn it?” he said, addressing my father, whom he found to be more receptive. “You are the famous artist, they say. You get paid a lot of money for these things. Where’z it gone, then?” He drove his toe into a pile of design sketches. I said to myself, Remember fear? How the bullies want us to feel it and we must not? Nothing ever frightened Hokusai but Monster Boy. His fear was caused by his love. This was a weakness in him, this longing to see something good in his grandson. I was not similarly afflicted. I stood over my father.

That day, when Shigeshiro was gone again and Hokusai was sitting by the coal fire, I put a cold cloth on his bruised cheek.

“Oh, he is a good boy under all of that,” he said.

“You never felt that much love for me,” I marvelled. “You old fool.”

Hokusai did not answer for a while. Then he said, “I don’t need to. You’re strong.”

So that was my problem! “You love him because he’s weak?”

“He’s my burden. He’s my curse for all the things I’ve done wrong. He’ll improve; he’ll grow up.”

“He won’t, Old Man. He’s a lost cause,” I said.

S
o he had come again. “You don’t fool me, Old Man. I know who’s paid a visit,” I said. Despite the disgusting fact that this gangster bully had beaten up on an old man with palsy, I was glad it was the devil we knew and not the guards.

When he had his potato liquor he was much better. Then I told him the bad news.

“I dreamed of waves last night and the Dutch doctor in them,” I said.

He rubbed his cheek. He rolled his tongue. These were exercises. But I knew he was listening.

“More than that,” I said, “today in the streets I heard the crier. There was a typhoon in Nagasaki and his ship has crashed on the shore, so he cannot leave Japan. And he has been investigated. All his treasures are confiscated.”

My father was superstitious. This happens when you are sick and always praying for respite. He stared at me with rounded eyes. “You ’a soo-sssooo-ayer.”

“I see things,” I agreed. “But not soon enough. We are in danger. We have sold him our paintings. They may be on that ship.”

W
E ELECTED TO MOVE HOUSE
, again. This time we chose a part of Edo we didn’t know at all.

We had several robes each, a tea kettle, cups, and our painting things. I called a bearer for my father, an incredible luxury, and carried the rest through Honjo and then farther, to where the back streets were not so crowded. The little dark rooms that we stepped up into from a back street were identical to the ones we’d left. No one hailed me when I went out for grilled eel. We didn’t even tell our publishers where we were.

But we were too starved for news to stay hidden for long.

“You always said the best place to hide is out in the open,” I said to the Old Man one restless morning. “And no one will be looking for us in the place we are most expected. Can you walk?”

To my surprise he got to his feet easily. We walked across to the river, my father with his straw hat low over his face and leaning on the bo. We took the ferry to the Yoshiwara. Just at the gate was the big banquet hall.

The wooden noticeboard in front announced the event: “Today, Poetry Party,
3
p.m.”

I loved the ageya. It was huge, one hundred tatami mats. From the street you saw only dark slats of wood with squared-off lattice windows made blank with white paper. If you looked up you saw the roof tiles on the first and second storeys, curved to ripple like small waves; the ends were impressed in the owners’ crest—mulberry leaves under a temple roof. Bronze lanterns lined the wall that faced the street.

The inside was cool, freshened by the high roof with its slit opening for smoke. Filtered daylight fell on the wooden floor near the windows, but the centre was dark. I could just make out the racks on the walls, where the swords of visiting samurai lay harmless side by side.

As we entered voices chimed out, “Hello! Welcome!”

“Hokusai! Old Man, what are you doing? Have you designed any new prints? Are you working on a book?”

“No, no,” my father said. “Nothing new.”

“Never quite what one had hoped, this life,” said the owner.

From the entry I could see into the kitchen with its cauldrons of steaming water, the iron kettle, the bucket and well. Cooks moved deep in concentration, their sweatbands printed with the temple and mulberry. The owners came hurrying with hands together to greet us.

They were the fifth generation; they had rebuilt the ageya on the ashes of the original after it burned with the Yoshiwara. We went down the hall to the “fishing net room,” with its ceiling made of woven strips of wood. On the walls were paintings of Chinese children playing with kites, touched with gold leaf but sooty and dark. I lit my pipe. The press of bodies increased. No one said a word about our notoriety, or mentioned our friendship with the Dutchman who was now a prisoner of the realm. We were welcomed, the two of us.

Poor Waki the tattooist was showing his watercolours: he had no talent, but he was determined to make his name. After him came a literary-style brush poet, some parodists, more painters unrolling scrolls.

All afternoon we drank tea and ate soba noodles, my father’s favourite. We ate pickles and grilled fish. As the light failed the waiters brought in tapers so we could see our fellow artists gesticulating in their hour of glory.

Finally it was night and the little candles on the low tables gave a glow that outlined every head, every set of shoulders, every forehead with gold so it stood out against the dark. The high ceilings rose above and through the air holes I could see stars. It felt like earlier times. I knew that this safety was a temporary thing, and so I loved it all the more.

Into our midst with a clamour of greetings and cries for drink came a group of scholars of Dutch. They had news.

“Court Astronomer Takahashi, known as Globius, has been arrested! He has been denounced by Mamiya the explorer!”

These were the men I had seen in the entry rooms of the Nagasakiya. “What for? What does Mamiya say that Globius has done?”

“He traded maps of the secret reaches of the kingdom to the Miracle Doctor, who would have taken them out of the country had not the God of the Sea risen up.”

How quickly they dropped their sophistication and spoke with the old beliefs.

“Someone has informed on him. Someone he trusted.”

The tailor beside me spoke. “These are the intrigues of the powerful, always trying to do each other down! Who cares?”

A sombre, downcast line of geishas moved in silently and disappeared behind the rolled blinds on the stage. Then the blinds were lifted to reveal them. I watched their white faces: how garish they looked. I recognized their special gaze, false but pleasing to men. I wondered how men could be so easily fooled, or if they were fooled by the geisha’s forced delight.

The music began. I swayed in my own world, like the soothsayer at the foot of the bridge with the crowds clattering past her. I moaned too perhaps. We had been drinking all day. The smoke from the fires and the pipes hung in the damp air: my legs felt cramped. I stood and excused myself.

In the enclosed garden two old pine trees leaned together, one with a thick limb that grew horizontally, nearly on the ground, for the distance of ten long steps at least. This limb was propped up with bamboo crutches. I loved to stand in that little courtyard. There was a cat, winding himself along the wooden poles, then darting under the planks. Rain was falling; thunder came and, close after it, lightning, which set our fellow listeners to a frenzy of murmurs and oaths to protect themselves. Better yet, drink up.

Inside, the men came to lift the small tables away for dancing. My father and I paid for our food and pushed our way out through the sweating bodies to the street. The rain had stopped. Everything was shining through the fog. The lanterns at intervals over the narrow walk threw their yellow light down, making a pattern of light and dark.

We looked overhead for the Seven Stars. But they were not there. We had a long walk ahead. My father was slow and one leg dragged. He leaned against me. We were both silent as we breathed the night air and stepped in and out, in and out of visibility. The boatman was kind and took us up the river near to our new house.

I
T WAS WEEKS AGAIN
before I could leave my father. But some small work at last found us—a pair of demon quellers for a temple fair—and two students came to complete it. I made my way to the Ichibee bookshop, where the gossip from Nagasaki would be fresh. The postal runners had been slowed by uprooted trees on the Tokaido. But finally they had arrived. They had little news. I asked about von Siebold’s wife. Was she hurt? And the child, who must now be four years old? No one knew. What about his collections? His paintings—our paintings (my paintings)? Had they been on the ship that blew ashore?