The Ghost Brush (14 page)

But luckily for us, the Shogun delayed the foreigners’ appearance before him. One day and then another, the Dutch waited to be called to the castle. We all continued to work on the scrolls. It was as if the Shogun was helping us, but of course he would not have if he knew. He forbade this trade.

Four days later we finished the scrolls.

I ran to the Nagasakiya with the news. We were asked to bring them that same day.

The opperhoofd was very pleased with his scroll and produced the gold ryo exactly as had been promised. But Captain Hemmy put his spectacles down his nose and set the scrolls side by side. He compared his to his superior’s, unrolling them together, inch by inch.

Hokusai looked up and looked around. He made a little musical noise with his lips. He farted.

“Both the same? Both from your hand?”

Hokusai did not deign to answer.

Captain Hemmy let his spectacles fall off his downspout of a nose to his chest.

“I believe mine are copies,” he said. “They are inferior. The price should be exactly one-half.”

It was a terrible insult.

Without speaking, and with enormous dignity, Hokusai wrapped up his kimono in the front of his thighs and cleared his throat with that hiss I knew so well. He stepped forward and carefully, even gingerly, rolled up the second set of scrolls. He did not bow. He took me by the hand and we walked out. The large wooden door closed behind us, and we were back in the streets of Japan.

At home my mother took the 150 ryo and asked for the other 150. My father showed her that we still had the second scrolls. “He tried to cheat me.”

She screamed. “You have the airs of a lord and the ways of a peasant! Why are you so proud?”

“You know nothing.”

“We need this money. Half of it is spent already.”

He shrugged.

“Do you deny it? Look at this child. He is hungry!” She pushed my little brother under his nose. I guess we girls weren’t hungry?

You couldn’t escape their fights in our small rooms. My sisters and I wormed our way into the corner and covered our ears, but the shouts penetrated all the same. “Where is that useless older brother? He should be bringing money into this house!”

“Woman, beware! Curse the children of my dead wife,” Hokusai said, “and you will bring down demons on your head.”

“And you, Tokitaro”—she called him by his birth name to remind him he was nothing much—“you love the dead and not the living. You love yourself and not your faithful wife. One hundred and fifty ryo would save this household from great misery.”

I prayed that she would be silent. But the woman sailed out in gusty lament, moving in circles like a hawk in a gale. At last she exhausted herself and collapsed.

“You waste yourself in rage,” he said. “But I forgive you.” He spoke gently. “You cannot help it. You do not understand me, and you will never understand me.”

My mother wept.

“Which part of our poverty do you think I don’t feel?” Hokusai said. “The cold and wet? The shabby garments? The way I work through the night? The way this child runs errands, as I did as a boy? The way, even though my mastery is accepted all over Japan, we have meals of rice alone?

“You may think this is misery,” the Old Man went on, “but there’s something worse. That’s when a stranger—a barbarian—holds me in low regard. When he says I have not done my best work.” He was good, that far. Then he lost it. He flung his arms out and stamped. “Anyway, he is a bad man. He is not a good person. Unpleasant airs emanate from him.”

“They eat beef, is all,” she said.

“I don’t care what they eat.”

“You don’t care what we eat.” She ripped through his words with a shriek.

“I care about respect.”

“You cannot eat respect.”

“Yes, I can.”

He popped his eyes, sat with knees high and feet crossed, slurped and burped and rubbed his stomach. I fell into a giggling heap. My older sisters hated him for teasing my mother. She began to moan. My younger brother sat staunch with his eyes on the pathetic little fire in our hearth. Sakujiro was so quiet. My mother slung him around from hip to hip like a bag of rice. He was a mystery to us all. But I suspected he was not stupid.

“See, Wife, that’s your problem: you can’t laugh.”

“Laugh?” my mother shouted. “No, but I can cry.”

That made an end to it for an hour or two. But then he asked her to serve him an empty bowl at dinner, and she did. He sat with his chopsticks, lifting his invisible dinner to his lips, smiling and winking at me, the accomplice.

“Your hunger may be in your big head, but you can’t pull off your magic with me,” said my mother. “Mine is in my belly.”

It was simple: Hokusai lived on invisible things, the good as well as the bad. It was an unfair fight, I knew that. He had a genius for taunting. He used words nearly as well as he used a brush. He was an actor. His ghost stories went to bed with me and his jokes woke me up. I understood the Old Man; my mother didn’t.

I felt superior to her. My father and I both did.

That night we went to the Yoshiwara, hoping for a glimpse of Shino.

The next day it began again.

“Your daughters are cold because we have no coal for the fire. Your son . . .” She pointed to the boy. He was poking the fire with a little stick, expressionless. He was a spooky kid, I admit. Even she had no words for him. “You paint all the beautiful ladies who are for sale, while I, your virtuous wife, have only one kimono—”

“Oh, this is tiresome, tiresome,” he said. He had been up all night. He spoke quietly while bent over a sketch. “For the sake of argument let’s call this misery. What I am saying is that I prefer misery to humiliation.”

“Why?” she said. “Humiliation is nothing to me. Humiliation is a mosquito to be waved away. Misery is in the bones.”

“Your ideas are from the old times, from the peasant times, the distant past,” charged Hokusai. “You have no pride. Pride is in the spirit; where is yours?”

But later, when they lay on their mat and were lovers again, he spoke tenderly. He rolled her frontward and back again, like a package, to get free of her wrapping. He propped her on her knees and knelt behind her. “Do it this way and you’ll be in the pictures,” he said. “Isn’t that what you want?”

“It is not the laughing pictures I want to be in!”

“But I can teach you.” He laughed and she cried. Then she wheedled. I was young, but I had heard many women wheedle.

“Tell me, Husband, don’t you wish you had taken the 150 ryo?”

Shino would never have said that.

T
HE NEXT DAY, LO AND BEHOLD
, Captain Hemmy and his Japanese escort appeared at our door again. I was sent out to tell their translator that my father was too busy to see him.

“I understand,” he said. “But we are very patient.”

They sat by the door all day. When evening came I admitted the translator. He bowed very low and asked forgiveness for suspecting Hokusai of making a copy. Captain Hemmy had reconsidered. He would like to have his scrolls and he had brought the money.

My father didn’t want to sell, I knew. But my mother’s sheer volume had made an impression. “You will have to inspect the studio books,” he said to me, “to see if the scrolls are still available.”

I went to the other room and played with the cats for a long time, and then I brought the scrolls to where the translator waited and so it was done. We paid our debts and my mother was happy for a time, and when he laughed, she laughed as well.

Later the news came that Captain Hemmy had died on the long journey back to Nagasaki.

“Oooh! Do you see? Do you see what happened? I told you so!” said Hokusai. And oohed and aahed. “Do you see? I told you he was full of an evil spirit. It overcame him, and he is gone. Probably he had an imbalance of the four grains. He was filled with bile. Even the Western medicine could not save him.”

Hokusai prayed, he chanted, he took his Chinese herbs and breathed incense. He wanted to expunge the Dutch captain.

I sometimes wondered what happened to the scrolls Hemmy bought when he died. No one knew. Maybe they travelled to Europe with one of his party. Perhaps they were sold there and started the fame that would make our life a little easier, before it made it much more difficult.

12

The Waves

NOW IT WAS FOUR YEARS
after our first encounter with the Dutch. We sat by the side of the Tokaido, amongst the peasants and noodle sellers. We had decided to wait to see the barbarians again. Hokusai sketched. I had a brush myself, which I used to practise characters. By the time the noodles were cooked, the procession had appeared. At first it was a cloud of dust, far down the road. Then it was noise—drums, whips, neighing of the horses. We were supposed to kneel and bow, but my father wouldn’t, so instead we moved back from the road into the rushes.

Two policemen were at the head of the procession. Behind them, oxen crawled and horses cantered. The drivers shouted. The porters trailed along like bent hooks under tubs of foodstuffs and a cookstove. Then came a giant black piece of furniture, borne aloft on men’s shoulders. It was covered with a red cloth written on in gold: this was their counting house.

The bearers stopped. The palanquins jolted to a stop with the curtains open. The barbarians’ heads poked out; two of them climbed down to see what blocked the road. They were very tall and dressed in heavy black coats with hats like stovepipes. Their skin was pasty white, and copper hair hung from their chins and grew under their noses. Their eyes were cool and lit from within, like the eyes of wolves.

They opened their baskets of linen and their cooking pots, and they set up their bizarre furniture, tables and chairs. The bearers began to prepare tea. A lacquered black sedan chair shook and out of it came their leader, like a tall puppet. He sat for his red devil meal of tea and cakes while the doctor began to look at the sick babies and old women.

My father approached. The translator glanced down at him: a peasant, dusty, on the road with other peasants.

“I have a question. Your scientists say that the world is round. Is it true?”

“Yes, it is true. We have sailed all around it in our ships.”

My father had many more questions, and finally three barbarians spoke to him and showed him the instruments they aimed at the sky. The moon was round; he could see that. Maybe everything was round. But if it was, then what about straight lines? Where did they come from? And how about the directions to the stars? Did those directions change when you were in a different place in the world? Was the sky possibly round as well? It would change everything.

The answers did not convince him, but Hokusai thanked the Dutch and told me we had to hurry on. It was getting dark.

He explained it all to me when we found a teahouse that would take us in.

“If this is true,” he said, “there can be no straight lines.”

I didn’t believe it. Straight lines were everywhere. You just had to look.

“We will find out for ourselves. We are going to the horizon. We’ll see if it is curved.”

U
RAGA WAS A SMALL FISHING VILLAGE
under a cliff, with sand shores. We had come out of the long bay that led to Edo. Now we looked out to the open sea. We walked to the far end of the shore, where there were some fishing huts. No one lived in these huts anymore; only a few old men and women walked the beaches with their eel spikes.

“I am Tokitaro of the family Nakajima,” said my father to one of them. They welcomed us. In one of their huts we put our bundles. My father sat on the beach and stared out at the sea, which he had told me was a great beast.

“What are you looking for?” I asked. There were no boats coming in, and none going out. Only the waves and the far horizon.

“Do you see that line? Where the water ends and the sky begins?”

“Yes.”

“That is the edge of the world. If the world is round,” he said, “that line must be curved, not flat. Tell me what you see.”

I looked at it very carefully. “It is a straight line.”

“You are wrong,” he said. “It is round, but it is very, very large—so large that it looks straight to us,” said Hokusai. “But it is a curve that is very wide. We are not far enough away from it to see the curve, not here.”

“We can’t get any farther away,” I said.

“Then we will have to change the way we see.”

H
okusai wanted to paint the waves. He sat for a long time trying to catch them at the right moment. But they moved too fast and were always dissolving in front of us.

“Nobody paints these things,” I said. “Paintings have people in them.”

“Yes, they have, but they don’t always need to.”

“Oh,” I said. I could see that he was planning more changes.

He was. He would make the people along the shore tiny, and that would show that the waves were big. He had the people all ready. Along the way to Uraga he had sketched peddlers of pots, toys, and baskets with their wares. Now he copied them onto a drawing of the shore. He made tiny offshore waves that arched like cats. He added himself, the old man.