The Ghost Brush (117 page)

Come let us drink our fill, carouse,

We know no tomorrow.

I made my way out to the wooden walk above the sunken garden. A giant metal lamp, saved from the fire, cast its light down into the gnarled tree roots. A cat sprang up and brushed my legs; I picked it up and stroked it. Raindrops, half frozen, glittered on the ends of the pine needles. Fallen needles gave a copper sheen to the earth. Some were carried in the trickle of water that snaked between the great bulging roots.

A movement disturbed the dark at the far side. Two figures parted, men in bulky costumes. Lovers? Or samurai conspirators? One and the same, these days. Both were doomed.

I recognized one. It was Sakuma, Kozan’s teacher from Obuse. The conspirators had such bold plots: they would break the Tokugawa. More and more one heard of Western ships touching down on the eastern shores of Japan, of their sails trembling beyond the reach of our guns. Von Siebold had told me, twenty years before, that our system could not hold back time. But I had lived so long this way, it was hard to imagine it could ever end.

A taiko drummer burst laughing out of the ageya hall onto the walkway. He had removed his shirt in the heat inside. His skin shone, rich and bronze. The party followed him outside.

“Give us a verse, Oei!”

The men pulled me back inside. “I will,” I said. “I will.”

“Will it be lewd?”

“For lewd, you won’t beat the Old Man.”

In front of me appeared a small water dish, rice paper, some black ink. I pulled a brush from my folder of brushes inside my kimono.

“Try this,” said Eisen. He showed me a strange device. It had the hairs of a brush. But it had a thicker stem, not the usual lacquered wood. It had a hole and a tube you squeezed. He showed me how to fill it with ink.

“I got it from Hiroshige. He invented it so he could sketch on the road.”

Two boys dressed up as girls got up to do a song. It was very sweet. One played a little tinkling flute while the other minced.

You are divine.

You are perfect for marriage.

You have class.

I have only one thing to ask.

Do you take it in the ass?

Their faces were all angles, the lines of nose and eyes like warriors’. My fingers itched to draw them. But who would buy a drawing of these faces?

E
isen and I took a rickshaw to the Ryogoku Bridge to see the New Year’s fireworks. Bundled onlookers filled the long arc of the bridge, which stood on its many thick wooden legs high over the wintry Sumida. The surface of the river was placid and boats large and small were anchored, waiting for the show. We stood at the high point—the boat with the fireworks discharger was beneath us. At the signal balls of gold and red flew high over our heads, curved, and began to fall, shedding coloured fire.

Eisen brought his drinking flask up to his mouth. “I loved you once,” he said. “But you were spoken for.” The river flowed silently in the darkness, a black lacquer base for the flowers of light and fire that plumed above. Who had spoken for me? Hokusai, of course. My father.

“My father says he will not die. But death is approaching. And so we wait and pretend it isn’t.”

“It is the pretense that exhausts you,” said my good friend.

I looked farther over the railing into the black. “You’re insane!” my father shouted at me. But he was the crazy one. How could I say this without betrayal?

“He is not himself,” I could say. “The Old Man is not available.” That would be polite. Eisen was my old friend. Yet there would be no confiding. I tried it this way: “The repose of old age, he doesn’t experience. He forgets. He insists. He changes his mind. He tries to run. He cannot walk. I obey his every word; I don’t expect him to be wrong. He is mad. So I am mad too.”

More fireworks arced over our heads, bursting with the accompaniment of the roars of the crowd. Below, on the moving water, the boats rocked in their straight lines as people stood to watch.

“He is angry because he is dying. And you are not.”

It began to snow, the flakes spiralling down from a great height, past our faces, falling to the water. I patted my friend’s arm, grateful for his presence.

We said goodnight. I would walk and walk as the night gave way to the dawn. At first the snow melted away into blackness when it hit the road. But it kept falling. When I reached the temple at Asakusa, snow was catching on the branches of the pines and there was glittering ice underfoot.

44

Un-Daughter Me

BUT IT WAS NOT MY FATHER
who died first. It was Eisen.

So he too was gone, my great friend.

The year did not improve.

My father became more frail, and more insistent. He lay all day on the thin mattress we had unrolled on the tatami mats and now never rolled up.

One day was worse than the others.

I called the boy to get the doctor. Shino had given me money, which I had hidden from Hokusai so he would not spend it on sweets or throw it at a vendor who came to collect. The doctor came.

“There is nothing to be done,” he said. “It is old age. It cannot be escaped.”

Later Hokusai woke up. He began to beg. He could do so much, if the gods would only give him ten more years. He could become a great artist. He begged for ten, then eight, then, wheedling, even one. One more year, and he would become great.

It broke my heart to hear. He could get everything he ever wanted from me, but the gods were not at his beck and call. Immortality was not to be granted, not in this case.

I sat beside him and listened to him bargaining with the gods.

“If I can’t go on as Hokusai, I agree to become an elephant or a blind man, a turtle or a fox.”

“A fox is good.” I said this to ease him, but he was angry. He turned on me.

“Hereafter my failures will all belong to you, Ei. And your success will belong to me.”

What could he mean? But I knew. That his bad works would be understood to have been from my brush, and my best would be assumed to be his. And it was probably true. I dared a sardonic laugh while I admitted as much. That set him off.

“In my next life there is one thing I will not be: a father. This link of me to you will not survive death. This tie will die. I will be free of you!”

He wounded me. “Die, then!” I said. “I shall have no father. Die and thereby un-father me,” I sobbed.

“I shall, and un-daughter myself.”

We were silent for a few minutes. Then he thought better of this plan and tried to win me back.

“But what am I without Ei, my daughter? She brings my tea. She knows my stories. Every picture I draw is carved not in wood but in her mind. She came from me . . .” But he couldn’t stay on this positive line. “From all the wasteful seed. The sons and daughters. Of all of them, why this one?” he raged. “This aberration, this woman-not-woman.”

I hid my face so he could not see my grief. He spoke to his god.

“Of all my deeds, the one to engender her outlives me.”

Eisen’s words helped me. My father was angry that I would live, to paint, while he would not. I steeled myself against him.

But then, he would weep. “I ask forgiveness. I regret what I have done. My greatness took away hers.”

He went silent and I thought he was asleep. But not.

“Ei,” he said, “you have time. When you are un-fathered, break loose and go on your own path.”

“What is my path?” I said. “How will I know it?” In not letting me sign my name he wrote me out of history, which he liked to keep for himself.

I had sworn to Eisen: “He will take me to the grave with him. He makes me old before my time.” Is the grave my path? No, it will not be.

“Do it. Go ahead. Die and un-daughter me, then.” I whispered that. But what would I be? What would the world be without my father?

The disciples came to watch over him, dry-eyed. They bowed, and waited, and watched the breath rise and fall in his chest. Then one by one they left. I saw the ones whose veiled eyes confirmed that they disliked the fact that his greatest disciple and his closest relative were one and the same, and a woman.

“Chin-Chin! Come to me. Write it down!”

He had composed his jisei, his farewell verse.

Though doubtless only as a ghost

Yet evenings sprightly will I tread

The summer moor.

In Obuse he had worked on this simple verse too. There, it had another line to it, which now he forgot. It was:

And frequent visits to Japan of foreign ships.

A strange line, and one that ruined the poem, but I knew why it was there. It was the release he waited for. Now he knew he would not survive long enough to see it.

I dreamed that Eisen came. His whorish old face with eyes puffed from drink gazed on me like an old nurse. “I loved you,” he said. “At least I think I did. But you were spoken for.”

“Love!” I said. “I would like to take up again this subject of love. I think it is nothing but a rat’s fart in a windstorm. And you can quote me on that.”

I
ASKED THE BOY NEXT DOOR
to bring tea. When it came Hokusai was someplace else in his mind.

“Die, then, Old Man, and un-daughter me,” I told him again while he lay and seemed not to hear.

In an hour, I thought better of that. Un-daughtered, what was I then? What was the world without my father swaggering ahead along the road?

“Old Man, you went ahead of the crowd. They didn’t forgive you that. Not the censors, not the Shoguns, and especially not your fellow artists. By the time they caught up, you had moved on.”

He smiled at that.

And me—I came along forty years after, myself. And these trappings of the world became my story. Trappings! Who called them that? An excellent word. I was trapped! The daughter in the service of her father. His dominance, his sensuality had overrun the boundaries. There was the faint echo now, of his animal presence, and of the three of us daughters in the studio. Father.

The judgmental thing I feared in him, I saw in myself. He had to exact perfection from himself and others. He did not accept that perfection was out of reach. He hurt people. Shino. My mother. He hated any deviation from his precious path—he showed no compassion for others. I stood over him with my head cocked to one side, as if listening to a voice from elsewhere. He neglected me, fought me, but never discarded me. I was all he had.

I loved him.

I
T WAS DAY
. I heard the voice of the fish vendor. “Eel to sell! Fresh from the market. Swimming in the marsh one hour ago!”

All night I had watched him grow more beautiful. The face so thin that the skin clung to his skull, translucent like hot wax around a lit candle. The thinking part of him was moving out, vacating its space, ceasing to know. I took his hand. He begged forgiveness for his failings, and then he asked me to carry on making pictures.

He had spoken of wanting every line to be true. He had begged for just ten more years. He would continue striving to paint the truth.

But I knew the truth he sought was nothing. It was a phantom. An idea of perfection. Phantoms appear in different guises to us all, and that was his.

I told him he would be reborn as a tiger, a tiger in the snow.

I held his right hand. It was unchanged: large, square, wrinkled, firm, so infinitely, invisibly capable that I was in awe. Could all that skill die in an instant? Surely not. It had taken so long, so very long, for every inch and cord to learn its canny powers. I was calm; he was calm. We had not had many such moments. This is the tragedy of death. It was bringing the peace we had ruined with our restless lives.

He squeezed my hand, my finer hand, and gave one more tremendous “Hah!” The hand went still and he was gone. Like that.

I kept the hand in mine a long time. Then I grew tired and lay beside him.

And now it was day. People began to arrive. Although I had told nobody, they knew. “He’s gone,” they said, peeking in. They had felt his spirit travel on. Bounding, they said, across the fields.

It was the eighteenth day of the fourth month—
10
May
1849
in the Western calendar. The plum had been and gone, and the cherry blossoms too. It was a beautiful day to be dead.

I am writing to tell you that my father went to his rest today, in the morning. He was peaceful and willing to go.
[Lie.]
He is in our lodgings as we prepare for the funeral procession tomorrow. I hope you can be with us.