The Ghost Brush (105 page)

“Strange hour to visit,” I said ungraciously, sliding the screen open.

Eisen’s samurai background assured that he had lovely manners if he was sober, and impeccable manners if he was drunk. We both understood why, years before, he had left the North Star Studio, choosing to learn elsewhere. He was restless and talented. Hokusai had kept him down too long, and Eisen sprang up in the world once he left us. I supposed he had merely come to give me his news. These days he was successful. He too used beru—in fact, he had used it first. We spoke about the sudden drop in its price: now everyone would be using it. We chatted awhile, and as I did not offer him anything, he bowed himself out.

But not long after, in the late afternoon, Eisen appeared again at the studio door. In that hour we were all women, cleaning our brushes amid chirps of tired conversation. He looked around and took the mood of the place. “What are you hiding here?” he said, and, “Your cherry tree is ravishing.” He picked up a cat and massaged it behind the ears in a way I took note of. “I am despondent. What are we men to do when the women refine their skills to such an extreme?” He stirred up the younger female students, flirting with even the plainest and shyest girl, who could not raise her eyes from the floor. Mune, confident in her role as lead student, played along. “If you are asking for advice, you might drink a little less and work a little more.”

He inclined his large and shield-shaped head in her direction. I found myself charmed. His rough edge disguised polish within, just the opposite of most people those days. “Ah, I thank you for your kind observation,” he said. “I am going to seed, it is quite true. I have decided, however, to put up no fight and to watch with detached curiosity as life’s temptations get the best of me.”

Titter, titter, went the ladies.

He helped me chase them out into the smoky decline of day, as if he thought one or another of them might take advantage of me. As I rolled up the papers he said, “Shall we go out for a little drink?”

I spoke more crossly than I intended. “You don’t need any more, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

He saw that I was not amused. He apologized profusely and left. There! I thought. I have got rid of a pest.

But I looked for him the next day. When I heard his soft cough at the shoji, I opened the screen rather quickly, which action was not lost on him. He tried to hide his small smile.

If I was not mistaken, that look of pleasure was gladness in seeing me. He was a little disreputable, with greying hair, noble, thick brows cutting straight across and a hawk-like nose. His deep, resonant voice was clogged with smoke. He apologized for the day before.

“You mentioned, Oei-san, that I did not need any more drink. I have no wish to argue with a lady so assured. And I hope you will excuse my saying so, but I very much do. It is precisely when a man has had a lot that he has need of more. Don’t you agree?”

He never used five words when fifty would do. How could I resist? And why should I anyway?

We sat in a teahouse and drank cup after cup of sake. I knew that my large ears burned red. I knew that my laugh—“ak, ak, ak, ak”—sometimes ending in a little explosion of smoke from my pipe, was not feminine. But I forgot how very unattractive these traits were. We talked about who was painting what, my father’s Fuji series, which new prints we liked and which we didn’t. He returned me to my door by moonlight and went off.

The next day I wandered into a bookshop to look at Eisen’s work. I found his print of Hana-ogi VIII, the most recent incarnation of the great courtesan. She had a shovel-shaped face which was very much like his own. She looked haggard, dogged, and beautiful. I studied it with admiration. How did he do it? There was much said in the plain white space he’d left for her features, and much in her hectic clothing. He had far more feeling than his clever chat let on.

I picked up a directory he’d written of floating world artists and was astonished that he spoke of me: “Ei, the daughter, works under her father. She is an excellent painter.”

Not many men would have said that.

The next time he came I offered him tea and called the boy next door to get it. He looked around at the little burner. “Are you cooking something?” he said hopefully.

I thought I should put him straight. “Pigment is the only thing I ever put on a burner,” I said.

“Let’s talk about your pigments, then,” he said. “How do you prepare them? You take such care.”

“It’s my job.”

It had been just a task when I first worked for my father, but now I was an expert and the process gave me pleasure. My colours were deep and clear, the envy of other artists. I had my own technique to get the paint thick and the colours dense. It was not a recipe I shared. I simmered the mixtures of lead and seeds as I was doing now. I added secret ingredients and then took a further step that no one knew of.

“Apprentices could do that.”

“Hokusai likes it better when I do.”

“I bet he does.”

Another night he said, “Why don’t you sign your Beauties?”

Maybe he was trying to stir up trouble. But I chose to believe he was only curious. “Why should I?”

“If you did, you might find out that you have quite a different style from your father.”

“That is the question, isn’t it?” My father worked in a thousand styles. “My colours are my signature.”

“Why should your father take the credit for them?”

“Because he is Hokusai. He is Iitsu, at the moment.”

“And you are Oei.”

“I am his daughter. Helping him is my duty.”

“Duty!” he scoffed.

That word belonged to the other side, the neo-Confucians with their old, repressive ways. We both saw the bankruptcy of that world. I admit I felt sheepish invoking it. Yet the new ways that we artists touted might change a great deal, but they did not erase the family.

“Maybe he takes you for granted.”

“So he should. Unlike others”—a little dig there—“I would never leave him.”

“You left your husband.”

“That was different.”

“Why?”

A pointless question. I shrugged. “A husband is dispensable if he is not loved,” I said.

“Not many women would say that.”

“Not many women would have the choice.”

He laughed.

I continued. “A husband can be left, but a father cannot. He is always attached. And my father perhaps more than some. He made me an artist. He loved me despite my unbeautiful face and ‘manly’ nature.” Of course, so did Tomei, but somehow that didn’t count.

“Was Tomei not good to you too?”

“He was,” I said. I knew it was unfair. “I have no answer.”

“I’m glad you said that. Love is mysterious and there should not be answers.”

By then we were tucked under the kotatsu, with its mixed cold drafts and hot spots, his head one way and mine the other. My fingers were curled around a teacup and his around a sake bottle. When he mentioned love I thought of the Dutch doctor. I thought of how my father had told me I always loved men who were taken. Was Eisen taken? I believed so. He had a wife. His hand was straying inside the collar of my kimono. It was not the least hesitant, making bold incursions inside my wrappings.

“If the two of you, Oei and Hokusai, were married, it would be different. You could be his silent partner. But you are not married! You are grown up, an adult. You should have your own name. You could be famous.”

“What a ridiculous thought!”

“You are a better painter than he is.”

I knew I was a better painter. Technically. More patient. More precise. Hokusai knew that too. But that didn’t mean I was a great painter.

“Painting is not all of it,” I said, pulling myself up to sitting. “He can draw and perform, and he imagines strange things . . .”

“Yes,” said Eisen, “he is Hokusai and you are not. But you are Oei and he is not. You understand women, you can portray humanity, you have a finer line, and you cook excellent pigment!”

I nervously retied my obi. I thought of the examination the Dutch doctor had put me under: he’d said that Japanese women became powerless in the realm of the emotions. That was my realm. I knew what it looked like: deep red, blue you could drown in, the green of thick forests. I even knew what it felt like. Or I had known, years ago. Maybe I had forgotten. I was the painter of intensity, not a native of that world. Was I too powerless in that realm?

Eisen reached for his sake. “You are so unconventional in some ways, and then you are so conventional,” he grumbled.

I took my pigment off the heat. It would now go underground for sixty days—the secret I was not telling him.

I
T WAS A FEW WEEKS
before I saw him again.

As the last of the students left, I pulled my winter wrap around me and stepped out the door. The air was chill; there was the smell of charcoal burning, and whiteness everywhere. The lanterns winked like fireflies all along the street. Suddenly he was there.

We took a ferry up from Yanagibashi to the Yoshiwara gate. The water was inky and the passengers silent. We walked side by side over the arc of the bridge and through the Great Gate into the pleasure quarter; our clogs beat on the hollow structure. I hadn’t been down the boulevard for a long time.

Ahead of us were the dark, shuttered sides of the little wooden houses. It was quiet. I had never before seen signs in front of the lower-class brothels: “Discounts Offered for Special Services.” We passed Mitsu’s shop. She had become a doom crier.

“You, you come here! I want to talk to you,” she said from her doorway. “Do you know?” she whispered melodramatically, her eyes huge, her lips stretched. “The end is coming!” She peered. “Do I know you?”

“It is Oei,” I said.

“Ei! My child. Remember the golden days of the Yoshiwara? Long ago, the streets were beautiful. And people came here to spend their money. Now the bakufu are going to shut us down.”

She was an old lady now. But in the lamplight she was just as she had been when I was a child. She must have had cataracts. Her eyes glowed strangely. Her skin was very white.

“Who is it with you? Is it your father?” she said, and then I knew she couldn’t see.

“No. It is Eisen, the painter.”

“Ah!” she withdrew into the darkness of her little shop. “Take care of the Old Man. The Old Man is in trouble. I knew he would be one day.”

“The Old Man is far away, safe, in the countryside.”

T
he doors were shuttered: people hurried in the gloom. Year by year the Yoshiwara was losing its allure. The great brothels were declining; there was competition from illegal houses in Shinagawa and other parts of town. It was no longer considered chic to spend all your money on a desperate love affair with a courtesan.

There was still, in the teashop, a display of bedding meant to tempt the yobbos—sumptuous red silk futons and sky blue sheets embroidered with rivers of gold thread—but it was covered in dust. We sat in the back, near the fire. Beside us was a courtesan begging her lover not to forsake her. She was watched by a patient young attendant. She was not young, but not old—probably my age.

She was elaborately decked out, her hair high, greased and punctured with lethal hairpins. Her face was heavily painted white, and her feet shone a chalky white too in the dark teashop. Her toenails were reddened with fruit juice. She shrugged her kimono back, and I could see a name carved in her shoulder. She had made her own tattoo this way, filling the wound with black ink.

It was the name of the man who was leaving.

Large tears stood on her pasty cheeks. Courtesans were famous for their tricks to make themselves cry “for love.” They pulled out eyelashes and sniffed alum. But this one was sincere. He was probably her last hope.

But he thrust her away and stood up. Before he had gone three steps, the courtesan had given up on him. She buried her head in her hands. The lamplight fell on the gouged-out characters of her lover’s name above her collarbone.

Her attendant extended a finger to touch the black scar. “You’re gonna hafta change it now,” she piped.

“Yeah, yeah,” said the woman, rubbing it absent-mindedly. “I’ll burn it with moxa and, once it heals, start over . . .”

And I thought, Here, I agree with the bakufu. The pleasure district is immoral. But not for the reasons they cited—that simple people enjoyed luxuries and forgot their woes. What was immoral was the suffering of the courtesans. Eisen read my mind.

“The doors of the Corner Tamaya are solid gold, but inside are plagues of flower and willow diseases. When the courtesans are sick, the owners put them in a chicken coop,” Eisen said.

Eisen himself ran a brothel for a time, but it burnt down and he was not sorry: it was more than he could stomach, he told me. Anyway, he could not compete with the unprincipled ones.

“The brothel owners go out to sumo matches and the theatre. While they’re gone the managers let in thieves and murderers, whoever can pay.”

His eyes glittered. His hands were near mine on the table.

I said, “It is difficult to remain a decent person in these times.”