The Ghost Brush (134 page)

Regarding the work titled
Bellflower and Taro
, which is stored at the Isago no Sato Museum: “This work was painted towards the last years of Hokusai’s life and might be Oei’s work with Hokusai’s signature. But I cannot be sure.”

Just to complicate things, Yusuke added a P.S.

Kubota-san does not buy this theory of a random killing.

Rebecca tried to picture it.

The highway climbed on narrow paths over the hills and between the rocky outcrops near the sea. Brigands burst out of the bushes—they slashed her with swords, they threw her to the ground. But near Totsuka? Totsuka was the sixth stop on the Tokaido, where travellers out of Edo usually spent their first night. The Tokaido was busy—with bullock carts and horse traffic, pedestrians, tea stops, inns, and peddlers in constant motion, going both into and out of the city with its one million inhabitants

The attack, and the disposal of Oei’s body, would have to have been very carefully engineered to go unnoticed. And if she was killed and her body successfully hidden, this suggested a more experienced assassin than any “random” attacker. If it was dark—and no one knew what time of year this happened—a body might be hidden, but it would soon be found, she imagined, by peasants or dogs, foxes or police inspectors.

And what about her documents? All citizens of Japan who went outside of their small quarter were required to carry a pass. Maybe her documents were stolen.

But she always carried her brushes. Wouldn’t the discovery of a woman’s corpse with brushes and paints trigger a police report?

So what if the assassin stole her brushes too? Did he, or they, open her kimono and take out her possessions? Was he, or they, looking for something of value? She looked like a harmless old woman. She was probably shabbily dressed. A woman like her would have had little money—unless she had just been paid for a commission. And no jewellery. What would she have had of value?

Paintings, maybe.

And the seal of Hokusai.

59

Poultry Lane

YOKOHAMA WAS A SCRAMBLING
, low place with dirty water running between the streets, and sailors from all nations drinking, and sad little brothels. Katsushika Isai gave me a room in an inn a few doors up from his printshop in Poultry Lane. He was the last of the ukiyo-e artists. A bout of cholera had taken my old friend and rival Hiroshige away. He was in his sixty-second year. He was buried in the inner garden of the Togaku-ji temple, Asakusa, beside a little pond, and his grave marked by a stone flanked by palm trees. I knew the place. He was three years older than me. Isai had a workroom in his shop. There I drew designs for woodcut prints, while old Egawa sat behind with his tools and carved the blocks. We made prints with bright colours featuring Western men and women, and showing all the changes in Japan. I did not sign them. We made our own seal for the shop.

I was pleased. I had found a way to go on. Isai was not my only customer either. I sometimes made pictures for the English newspapers, when the editor came to ask. And occasionally one of our old patrons gave me a commission. It was not the way it had been, however, when we could go and live there for months, taking our time. All that was over.

I bought food now to eat at the little table in my room: squares of tofu and bamboo shoots and cuttlefish and sweetened duck with taro. I bought my favourite miso-smeared cucumbers and white radish with its black-green wilted top leaves, the tiny fish grilled golden brown on skewers, and sour plums from the market. I spent hours window-shopping, like the careless girl I never was. The foreigners walked the wooden sidewalks with their heavy square-toed shoes. They brought their women too. They shouted and hailed one another across the mud-filled streets. They haggled for prices and carted off barrels and barrels of anything that could be bought.

In the bookshops there were dictionaries for barbarians with pictures of what our words meant, and other dictionaries so we could learn English. It was there I made a strange discovery. I picked up a little book—An Open Letter to the Japanese, it was called—by Doctor Phillip von Siebold.

The sight of his name shocked my body, drying my throat, striking a hammer in my chest. You would think that I was a silly young courtesan. As my father had so cruelly teased. It had been thirty years. I remembered the intimacy of our talks. And how I longed for my window on the world when he, collector of flowers and insights on the female of the Japanese species, was gone.

The book had been published in Japanese in Nagasaki. It appeared that the exiled traitor von Siebold had been allowed back in the country.

I skimmed his words. Von Siebold said that he had been looking out for the good people of Japan all along, even while he had not been allowed to come here. I could hear his voice in the words. He said he had foreseen our being overtaken by foreign powers. He said it was all happening as he had known it would. China had lost the Opium Wars to Britain and was now forced to trade the drug with the English. We were next. He had tried to warn the Shogun. In a royal letter from the King of Holland he had advised Japan to open itself, rather than be opened by American gunships. But the Shogun did nothing and kept his letter secret. Therefore the bakufu were not prepared and could only capitulate when the Americans arrived.

I read on, amazed that he was allowed to put all this in a book.

Von Siebold explained that the treaties giving Americans free access to our ports were not fair to the Japanese. The price of Japanese silver was too low, and the traders, who were making
200
and
300
percent profits on the goods they bought in Japan and sold in the West, were cheating us.

I bought the book.

At home I examined it thoroughly. There was no picture of Phillip. I wondered if I would recognize the Miracle Doctor. Or he me. I had been young then. Strong-jawed woman. I had grown into that chin, somehow. They said I was old, but I was not ugly, not anymore. I even thought I gave a pleasant impression to those I met. I had not a single wrinkle in my face, but there were streaks of steely grey in my hair where I pulled it back from my forehead. And I had learned to laugh.

O
ne day when I was washing out my paint dish at the gutter, a cluster of foreigners entered at the far end of the alley. This was not unusual. But this group had some very tall men, and something in the posture of one of them caught my eye.

I had known he would come. I had known since the banquet that the Dutch doctor had not forgotten me. But I had left my brother’s home and did not know if he could find me. But the printshop of Katsushika Isai would interest him, perhaps because it advertised the works of Hokusai.

He was walking quickly and scanning both sides of the alley, where the wooden houses stood on short stilts a little above the muddy ground. I crouched and kept my eyes cast down. As he came closer I realized it was not von Siebold I recognized, but a much younger man. The young man was just the way the father had been when we met thirty years before.

At the sight of this young man tears sprang from my eyes.

Oh, terror. I had gone soft. I kept my head down and prayed they would stride past. I did not want to be seen. So much for my many dreams of this man, or rather of his father.

They passed me without a glance and entered the shop.

Isai came with his soft voice to touch my back. “Oei-san, the Dutchman is looking for you.”

“He cannot be.”

“He wants to speak to the daughter of Hokusai.”

The residents of our alley stuck their heads out their doors. I saw my home in this young man’s eyes: low, ramshackle structures; people who were unkempt; children who were dirty; gutters that smelled. He had never seen me on my terrain.

“You must tell him I am not here.” I was panicked. What had I been thinking of, dreaming of such a man? My pride in myself collapsed. Probably I was ugly after all. I never looked in mirrors. What was to see? Every day I wrapped my long hair around a comb and stuck it in place with one long hairpin. I used no cosmetics, and jewellery would have been in the way. I wore a simple robe with a black obi. Over it I wore my working smock with its splashes of paint here and there—very few, as I was careful.

“Oei, go to greet him! He can make you rich.”

It shamed me that money was all my people thought about. I took the small bowl in which I had been mixing red with both hands. I sank it in the water and lifted it up. I swirled the water so it made circles. The dried red came off the sides and began to sweeten the clear water so it became thin, transparent crimson, thickening as I continued.

I was acting like my father. I had considered his balking very unfair when I was a child, when I had to do the social easing. But the indignity of my poverty and my pride in my work were too much in conflict for me to speak.

The young man came walking. He looked across me, scanning right, scanning left. His eyes met mine.

“It is a pleasure to meet the daughter of the great master, Hokusai,” he said in poor Japanese.

I found some lost graces. “I knew your father.” I smiled. “You are his double.”

Von Siebold the younger extended both his hands to me, and I gave him mine. I stood awkwardly, my arms and hands sticking straight out in front of me from the waist like handles on a cart. I had adopted my father’s strange habit of refusing to bow. Or rather, I had given up the strange habit of bowing.

“He will be very pleased to know that I have found you,” he said.

I looked into his stark blue eyes, which were only the second pair of blue eyes I had ever seen. And they were not the same as his father’s. They were cold.

“Extend him my best wishes,” I said.

The Dutchmen left soon after.

O
nly a few days later the little troop of tall men appeared again. There were two von Siebolds amongst them. And the people of that quarter who were standing alongside, watching this encounter between the yellow-haired barbarian and the daughter of the famous painter who was herself as famous a painter as a woman could be, murmured and called one another closer to watch.

His hair was now white. It was even more beautiful.

They led us to a teahouse and made us sit. I was grateful that this did not have to happen in my poor room. Nonetheless, the son would not sit, nor would he take tea.

I did not ask von Siebold about his Japanese wife. I asked about his Japanese daughter, Ine. Von Siebold told me she had become a midwife. He was proud of her. But I could see her existence troubled his fully European son.

The talk flowed. How did it flow? Why did it flow? There were few people in this life with whom I could talk. There was Sanba. There was Eisen. Strangely, too, there was von Siebold. All that time ago I had been able to speak my thoughts to him, and he understood. We had looked kindly on each other. We had disagreed; we had warmed to each other.

But that had been in the old world, under the nose of the bakufu. He was then one of the only foreigners in the country. His words had been my first messages from the outside. You are not like other Japanese woman, he had said. He did not understand why they settled for so little. I had clung to that idea. Instead of being a man, as my relatives accused me, I might resemble some woman of a larger world. Some woman who was not willing to settle for only a little.

Now we met again—not in a new world or in the old, but someplace ugly in between, where a new world was being born. I was almost nostalgic for the dangers of those days, so much simpler than the dangers now.

“I love them both very much,” he had said that about his Japanese family. And I had asked him if he had a European wife too, and he had laughed and said no. Only one wife. But I supposed he did take a European wife afterwards; this white-skinned son was proof.

As we spoke I could see him puzzling: Why is this daughter of the great master working down this mud alley? Why is she in poverty?

“Your father, Hokusai,” he said, “lived to a very great age. He had tremendous energy and a stubborn nature.”

He grew animated to speak of the man. But he had never met Hokusai! It was always me who came to the Nagasaki-ya.

Isai and the disciples stood around nodding. Now that my father had become a national hero, it was impossible to say anything negative about him.

“How were his last years?” von Siebold asked.

I listened, my head cocked to one side.

“What was it like at the end?”

“Difficult,” I said.

“Ah, but you were with him,” he said.

To my great alarm, the tears were welling again. And why? My brother had made me feel this way when he said he recognized that my attentions had kept our father alive. Was this what I needed? To be acknowledged? But that was a Western need, was it not?

This was the frightening thing about foreigners. In their presence one began to feel foreign emotions.

What could I say about my father?

Could I say that in his youth, his sensuality overcame me? That in his age, my father had abused me, taking umbrage at each little error and each little deviation from his precious art. Even though I was his daughter it was not right. I knew that now.