The Ghost Brush (15 page)

I was certain that it was not the kind of painting people wanted. I said, “Who wants to see just the water and an old woman carrying sticks in a pack on her back?”

T
here had been light in the sky, but night was falling. My father walked at the edge of the water. He turned and walked into the water, then he turned his back on it and towards me. He did this again and again, like a child, returning to safety and then going deeper and deeper each time.

I could see the lightness of his skin. I could see the white rim of water where it rose up. I could not see the water itself, because it was dark. But I heard it growl, the great beast. I was afraid of it, and of what it could do to my father. I tried running in it, but it sucked at my legs as if it would drag me down, and I jumped away.

He went deeper and the water picked him up and moved him. In the dark, it became invisible, but it still moved him along. I thought it might carry him away, and I began to whimper. My father had drifted. The foam was white or grey and occasionally came up and covered him.

A fishing boat appeared, coming in for the night. It came upon us suddenly, out of the dark. I imagined that the distance between me and the edge of the world was a scroll unrolling.

The boat appeared and then disappeared, rhythmically, as if in a dance. The men inside it were riding the invisible. Wind, or the pushing of the water, brought them in towards me. I watched to see where they would land, at the bottom of the scroll.

Foam swallowed my father time and again as the beast tossed. I stood on the sand. I thought that if I stood there at least he would come back to me. I moved back and forth along the shore, trying to be at his landing place when he finished his dance in the claws of the beast.

My father ran back and forth, echoing the motion of the boat as it rocked up and down on the waves, out far and high up. He ploughed with heavy feet, then was loosed and skipped, then turned as if he carried weights, then pushed sideways as if he had to push crowds out of the way to get where he was going. The water was black paper. He was the brush. His strokes were making a figure. What was he drawing?

I watched a long time. He drew many characters with his body. He stopped and started as if moving to music. He strove to remain erect. He strove to stay above the waves. His body used every muscle to articulate itself. It came to me that he was drawing his path. Perhaps it was his message to me.

But I couldn’t read it.

I called out to him, “Old Man, come back.” He did not answer. I even wheedled: “Old Man, I can make you some nice tea . . .” The water made him deaf. “Hey, you! Get the hell back here!” I tried. “You ugly thing!” Nothing.

I will remember this forever, I thought. I had no idea what forever would be. I did not know what my life would be, but standing there behind my father as he danced with the waves, I knew that I would always watch him tumble, would always think the ground underneath me tumbled just as the waves did. I would never trust that solid ground. I would face the tumult, scanning for the shadow man I loved. I was his child, but he was mine too.

We grew up early in my time. We learned about sex and the women who sold themselves in the Yoshiwara.

We were with the men in the studio when they painted the erotic prints. All those pictures of couples grappling, of women forced down to the mat—as if we didn’t hear it at night too, in our houses.

We knew about the hardness of life. I took charge of the money when my father couldn’t or wouldn’t. I heard my mother saying the words that would make him stop loving her. But that wasn’t the moment that turned me from a child to an adult. It was that day, in the waves. Me hollering after him like a mother.

When he came in at last, I asked him what he was doing. I gave him my boy’s jacket and tried to warm him. He was so excited he didn’t notice I was cold too.

“Puzzling,” he said. “I’m trying to understand. I know I’m here and there’s motion everywhere and there’s motion against the motion. I know that the foam and the water are two parts of the same thing.”

“Are they?”

“Yes,” he said. “Like ghosts and live people. Like spirits and demons. It’s fluid and it’s like smoke. It may even be like clouds.”

“That’s good,” I said, although I did not understand.

I went farther down the beach and asked a fisherman’s wife if she could give us some supper. My father would make her a sketch, I said. And he did, of her husband pulling in his nets. She was pleased. She loaned us two mats and two cotton blankets for the night. Then we went back to our little hut.

I
n the morning, when the sun began to emerge out of the water, my father was up again. He crouched on his heels at the shore and watched the fishermen push long skiffs through the advancing waves to get away through the crashing surf. When a boat shot through the wall of water, he cheered.

Then he watched as wave after wave broke.

The wind was high. It ploughed a furrow in the water. This was the beginning of a wave. The wave rose higher and then it was too high for itself. Before it broke, it began to pour. Clear water ran smooth as satin from the top froth to join in the indigo swirl below.

After a long time, Hokusai stood. He put his feet in the wet sand at the water’s edge. He walked in deeper; his feet sank a little into the sand.

He whooped with delight.

At noon it was warm. We splashed ourselves and then we lay down at the edge of the sea. The fisherwomen had big hats and covered themselves. We were showing our skin.

“It is difficult to bear the cruelty of one’s own people,” he said.

“What are you talking about?”

I felt the mixture of heat from the sun and cold from the watery sand on my body.

“I will have another chance. I will do better next time,” he said. Then he ran out and tried to jump the next wave.

I felt life endless ahead of me. There would be next times and next times again and again, lifting us up and ploughing us under.

W
e stayed there all that day and the next. He grew braver about the sea. “It is a beast, but I can tame it,” he said.

“I don’t think so.”

He went out farther and the froth curled around his skinny chest.

He couldn’t swim, so I had to follow him. I couldn’t swim either. As I reached the place where he was, he went to his knees to greet the water. I followed, trying to stay standing. The water sucked me back, trying to pull my flesh from my bones. He let it knock him. He went sideways and straightened himself. I spit salt out of my mouth.

“We will come to this life again,” he said.

The wave slapped him.

He went deeper, turning sideways. Now he was standing in a blue-and-white water spiral.

He fell.

The wave pounded him down to the sand. It scooted him forward. He was rolling. He had no control. He was in the wave.

Gone.

I stood. I waited. I watched for him to come up. I waded a little closer to where the water stopped its slide forward and began to slide back. I stood.

He popped out of the wave and slid forward on the sand.

My two ankles were there like bamboo stems. He grabbed hold of one.

I decided to try it. I lay in the shallows, letting the water push me. The wave from behind was cloudy, then clean as it curled down.

The motion of the water pushed me down.

I was very cold and frightened but happy: I was playing with my father. He was all mine. I wondered if he was thinking about Shino, or about my mother, or about what he did with one and the other. I wondered what he thought of me and then realized that I knew: he did not think of me. He was used to me, that was all.

So it fell to me to think of myself. What was I like? I was not in the habit of thinking of myself as separate from him, from anyone. I was ugly, I supposed, but I was smart and ready with my tongue. And with my brush I could do whatever he expected. That seemed to be enough.

Later in the afternoon he came and sat on the sand and waited for the wind and the sun to dry him.

“Now we will go back to Edo,” he said.

I was disappointed. “I thought we were going to live here.”

“One day we will. But for now I must go back.”

“Why?”

“I have to find a publisher and make prints and sell my work.”

“But you said we would live here. And you would trade your sketches for food.”

“Did I say that?” He looked genuinely puzzled. “It’s no good. I can’t. It won’t satisfy me. It’s not the real world.”

We stood up and began to walk back.

13

Home Again

IN THE YOSHIWARA IT WAS SPRING
. Carters with bursting cheeks walked up Primping Hill with cherry trees in tippy wheelbarrows, clouds of lime green on thin grey stems. The wheels rumbled, hollow, up the mound of Hesitation Bridge. On the downslope the men ran around in front and pressed their backs against the barrows to stop them rolling out of control through the gate.

Once across the wooden bridge the carters fanned out along the boulevard. They got out their shovels and started digging. I wondered where the trees came from. What nursery, what little paradise fed them until it was time? When the trees were in the ground, they would look as if they’d been there forever. In one week the little drop balls would be swelling and opening, and in two the seashell pink would be awash over our heads and all the parties would begin.

Mitsu, the gossip, came out of her shop. She pointed at my haircut and covered her mouth, giggling. My father got right down to business.

“Where is Utamaro?”

Her eyes expanded with relish.

“At home now. But things are worse, worse even than when you left!” she said.

I could see my father rock back and set his eyebrows up. Oh, yeah? She was too dramatic, Mitsu. The wrong person to talk to now. She loved bad news. You had to take everything she said and hold it under cold water for a minute.

“Scandal, scandal.” She stopped to catch her breath.

“Brigands! They broke into”—she named one of the mid-range brothels—“and ransacked the place. They raped two of the courtesans and cut one of them in the neck. It’s terrible.” She lifted her great big, knobby finger and waggled it. “Oh, this district is going to the dogs. In older days, you know as well as I do, these types would be stopped at the gates. Now we can’t even catch them when they don’t pay their bills.”

Next door, sweet-faced Waki was working on a back tattoo for a fireman. He left his client lying on the table and came out to greet us. “I will do an excellent job,” he whispered to my father, “because once you get one fireman coming to your shop, you get all them.”

I realized then that it wasn’t the design that made him happy; it was the strong, masculine fireman lying there. He lifted his head and winked at us. He winked to show that he could take the pain. And Waki returned reverently to him. Here was the man-fabric he had been longing for.

Hokusai was agitated with the news but not unhappy. “That is the city,” he told me. “Always changing, always tragedies.” We had been gone for only a few days. Already Utamaro was out of jail and robbers were attacking the brothels. He smiled and tilted his head this way and that. The birds, the flowers, the cats in the gutter—they all got a smile.

W
e walked on to Etako’s inn. A man stepped in our path at the door.

“To what do we owe the pleasure?” said Sanba.

“I have returned to the world.”

“I suppose you missed me.” He included me in his smile.

“Not at all. It is only necessity,” said my father. “I must be in the world.”

“Well, the world has got a little darker since you left us,” said Sanba. He jerked his head towards the corner, where a man sat writing on a scroll, scowling. He made sure, swift brush strokes, stopping every few seconds, dipping his pen and admiring his work. As he wrote he reached out absently to grasp a little cup in his thick fingers, quaff the contents, and set the cup down.

“Who’s that?”

“Out-of-work samurai,” said Sanba. “He’s about to hector us. There are more like these every day.”

The man finished what he was writing. He stood and raised his voice over the noise of the crowd.

“Edo is becoming a place of moral disorder,” he shouted. Actually he was reading his own words. “Moral life has been thrown into disarray. It’s a disgrace!”

“First they come to enjoy our fun, and then they try to redeem themselves by pronouncing us evil,” said Sanba. “Sad-and-Noble’s work goes on.”

The samurai was using all those ancient words that were supposed to be our hallmarks. “Virtue and benevolence have been lost through treachery!”

“He’s a moron,” said my father loudly.

The courtesans nodded in the corners of the room, making assignations. “Whose treachery, love? Have you had your heart broken?”

“Love is all you think about. Look at you! Playing at love. Working for your own gain. What kind of men are you? Spending your money on prostitutes and drinking. No one is loyal. No one is serving his master. What has become of the Way of Tranquilizing the People?”