The Ghost Brush (121 page)

Paul Zeller was highly entertaining. He told her how, in the years after the opening of Japan in
1853
, and for the rest of the century, everything was up for grabs. Treasures from temples and palaces were sold. An ancestor of a titled family from the West Country went over from India and bought a six-panel screen of Hideyoshi entering Kyoto on a black horse, with the townspeople bowing. This was auctioned thirty years ago, and Paul Zeller got it. When he took a good look at it, flaked with gold and all the rest, he saw clearly that it had been made for the Shogun himself. Anything could be got. “Temples,” he said, “broken up and the works sold off.”

He took a rather detached view of the transactions of dealers. These objects passed through his hands but weren’t his responsibility. He told a story of an important museum that bought a Meiji forgery and then tried to get the money back from the dealer after it was exposed. “But,” he said, “they’ll never get it back. I know the man.”

His conversation was most diverting, and he had an answer for everything. Along the way he gave potted opinions of all the experts: Lane was “an idiot” (glad to hear he thought that) and John Carpenter was “the best in Britain.”

There were no absolutes in this business. A gifted amateur, he said, could just go around and see for herself. The proof was in the eye, and people’s eyes got indoctrinated. He talked about pigment analysis, which could be useful for dating works when the authorship was in question, and where it was being done. Rebecca thought: Oh, here we go. Is this one more layer of earth piled on top of Oei’s corpse in her non-grave? The dealer. The preservers. The machinations in the art world. Was there no end to it?

J
ust as she was standing to leave—and she had been there a long time; they had spoken for hours—Paul Zeller became more spontaneous. He began to open up. It was not that he had been anything less than charming, not that he had not been forthcoming throughout; it was nothing that strong. He had been wonderful. It was just that he had wanted to hear what she said. Now he began to say what he thought.

He said he thought Guan-yin’s Arm was Oei’s masterpiece. Why had it been let go from Japan? The museum where it was held went bankrupt. No one else in the country wanted it: a shame. Why did it end up in Cleveland? Because Sherman Lee, one of the giants in the field, who went into Japan after the Second World War with the navy, was there, understood the significance, and caused the gallery to buy it. But the subsequent curator had been let go.

So the attribution of Oei’s paintings encompassed many stories, many dead ends, actually.

He said he thought Tiger in Snow was by Oei. And all those other tigers that were painted near the end of Hokusai’s life. He thought Promenading Courtesan was by Oei, and certainly the rest of the “Dutch” paintings were hers.

There was more. The short screen of the phoenix—the Ho-o bird—which was in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and attributed to Hokusai? Hers, he said. And the Ho-o bird in Ganshoin temple in Obuse, spoken of as one of his last works? Hers too.

“Once you ‘get it’ about Oei and look at the Hokusai works, you can see it everywhere you look. You can’t miss it if you have eyes in your head,” he said. “The study of Hokusai has to be thrown out and started all over again. It’s all rot.”

He believed in the possibility of discovering caches of paintings. Paul Zeller said, “Keep looking and searching.” He gave Rebecca names of people to write: translators, researchers. He gave her transcriptions of the proceedings of conferences. He told stories illustrating his own techniques when he wanted to find a picture. He advertised in newspapers; he wrote to museums and galleries. He chatted up the survivors. Do it, he said. “Eventually, more paintings will turn up.” He guaranteed it. “It’s time,” he said, “for the story to come out.”

W
e skipped, elatedly, back across Regent Park, down to Tottenham Court Road. Then it struck us at the same moment: if these things were being said in private all around the world, why didn’t someone publish them? It was indeed time for the story to come out. But how was it going to come out?

All those museums holding works of great value because they were by the master. All the weight of art history. Of cultural history. The investment in the status quo. And almost everyone with something at stake.

R
EBECCA WAS IN THE BODY OF A PLANE
, on the runway at Heathrow.

She pushed herself back against the seat, grasping the armrests. The plane began to roll slowly forward. It had to break through the sheer weight of air, to escape all those workers outside, with their ropes and their hand signals, those blind men measuring the elephant, and get airborne.

So did she.

Takeoff pushed her back—her chest, her spine, her pelvis pressed into the seat. The plane took a steep right-angle turn. She was dangling head down over England. All its little green squares fading into mist.

T
ime for some turbulence, I say. Time to shake her up. She needs to let go of all the assumptions she drags behind her like that little black suitcase with its red tassel. Time to jettison the attitudes that she—even she, who should have known better—wanted to import into the past. She had the information about this “Oei” person, who, I was beginning to realize, was not so much me as fiction, a cluster of premises. She was just coming to the wrong conclusions. Begging the question, as she would say.

Point one, I told her sternly: You assume that Hokusai’s signature raised the value of a work and Oei’s signature lowered it. Therefore, Oei could not afford recognition.

But there is evidence: the receipt for Chrysanthemums, showing that she was paid more than he ever was.

So why not make the opposite conclusion? Oei’s signature raised the value of a piece of work in the end. Commissions came to her. The simplest thing is to believe that this was because she was the better painter, the one whose work was wanted.

Point two: You assume that because she mixed the pigments, she was secondary.

But the gem-like colours were the strength and uniqueness of the work.

So why not argue that making the colours was a primary part of the teamwork of Oei and Hokusai? That only she could do it so well in all of Japan, giving her father a great advantage over other painters? Wasn’t the last book Hokusai wrote called A Treatise on Colour? Wasn’t he in his last two years of life at the time?

Point three: You assume that Oei completed those paintings dated “age
88
,” putting his signature and seal on them. On this one there was little disagreement. She must have: his palsy had returned, and he could no longer see the fine lines. Because of the customs of the time. Because he was the man. Because he was her father and he was famous. She didn’t sign them because she didn’t want to.

Isn’t that too just a little bit convenient? Where is the human being who does not want recognition? What if she—I—did want recognition? What if she—I—was prevented from signing my own name? What if, by that time, I was so in the power of my father and his studio that I had no options?

I can still hear Hokusai, lying on his deathbed, chuckling in that easy way we shared: “Hereafter my failures will all belong to you, Ei. And your success will belong to me.”

So what if all the negatives attributed to Oei—her gloom, her fondness for drink, even her divorce (because it was sometimes said that Hokusai’s wives did not die, but ran away)—were in fact his attributes. When they are seen as his, they are lovable and only prove his greatness.

And come to think of it, point four: The gossip is that Oei drank. Well, who didn’t? What if in the end it was Hokusai who drank? You’ve seen that recipe for his dragon liquor: two cups of shochu morning and night. Shochu is strong. It’s made of potatoes; it’s like vodka. Two cups morning and night . . . And you heard, during that first symposium at the Freer, the Japanese curator who said, with what had to be sarcasm, “Some of these paintings from his old age look as if he was drunk. No, I forgot. He didn’t drink.”

That bad habit too was given to me, the one who perhaps signed her name as “drunken,” though the same character could be read as “flourishing.” It would explain a lot—where the money went, the frequent moves and dodges, and the fact that while Hokusai has nearly ten thousand images attributed to him, a conservative guess would say his actual output was only three thousand images—a good many less than the average output of a ukiyo-e artist.

That number was produced by the intrepid Kubota-san. We had it in writing.

I
kept her hanging up there. Her blood was rushing to her head.

She suddenly saw it. Okay, so the story looks like this: Hokusai was a drinker. He was gloomy and divorced. He was untidy and unkempt. He spent all the money he had. He became eccentric and impossible to deal with, almost crazy, in fact. Oei got commissions and earned enough to keep her father and herself going. When he died she continued. She made a life as “one brush.”

But then what?

Then the remaining facts as we know them follow perfectly.

She wished to live on her own, but the family was difficult. The disciples wished to uphold the legend of Hokusai, and the studio was in turmoil. At the same time, because of the political situation the ukiyo-e world in general collapsed. So that just when Oei thought her time had come, that she could emerge as an artist in her own right, she was dead wrong. The whole little complex of people who lived on Hokusai’s myth could not afford to have that happen. In fact, her time had run out.

T
he plane straightened out on its course to the west. Rebecca was right side up again.

And that version may even be true, she thought. It has merits. But I may never know.

The plane banked again, sharply, in the other direction. She was almost upside down again.

In any case, let me not be complacent, and surely not complicit, she said to herself.

Part 5

48

Chasing Oei

For eight years after Hokusai’s death Oei continued to live in Edo. Oei took pupils, mostly the daughters of merchants or
hatamotos
(government officials). She taught them in her own residence. Aside from her excellent skill in painting, Oei did physiognomy and fortune reading. She became a Buddhist, and chanted the sutra every morning. Known as a person of eccentricities, she would take medicine called
fukuryou
(a kind of mushroom that grows in the root of a pine), hoping to become a female wizard.

— Iijima Kyoshin,

The Story of Katsushika Hokusai
(
1893
)

After her father’s death her idiosyncrasies became more pronounced and Oei left Edo for distant Kanazawa on the Japan Sea, where she died at the age of sixty-six.

—Richard Lane,

Hokusai: Life and Work (Barrie Jenkins,
1989
)

Hokusai’s death put Oei in a terrible grief. Thereafter, she did not settle in one place for long and often went away. It is said that one day, she went out, saying that she would go to Kanazawa (near present Yokohama), but she never came back. However, this “Kanazawa” could be that of Kagawa Prefecture (on the Japan Sea side). It has not been made clear yet. She was sixty-seven years old at that point.

—Hayashi Yoshikazu,

“A Woman Ukiyo-e Painter Who Drew Obscene Pictures”

After Hokusai’s passing, it is said that Oei became reclusive and eventually broke ties with relatives and her own painting students. She continued to paint to support herself, and for a while it seems relied on the hospitality of the family of Hokusai’s second son, Kase Sakujiro. Eventually she also parted ways with the Kase family, and declared that she could make a living on her own as a painter. Exactly where she spent her final days is still a matter of controversy: some accounts say Kanazawa in Kaga, others say Kanazawa in Musashi Province; yet others say she died in Obuse in present-day Nagano. Shrouded in the relative obscurity that marked her entire career, the actual date of her death cannot be confirmed, but evidence points to a date of about
1866
. There do not seem to be any surviving records of her final resting place.

—Kobayashi Tadashi,

“
The Floating World in Light and Shadow:

Ukiyo-e Paintings by Hokusai’s Daughter Oei
,”

Hokusai and His Age,
ed. John Carpenter (Hotei,
2005
)

Unfortunately she seems to have faded into obscurity after Hokusai died.