The Ghost Brush (18 page)

He died because he did not want to live.

15

The Blind Man

THE CITY WAS FULL OF BODIES
. Not only thrashed corpses and pickled heads, but quick bodies, wily and always in motion. The tattooed firemen raised their ladders showing cleaved buttocks and stout necks. Courtesans sat in windows with their kimono sitting wide over pale, round shoulders. The standing legs of throngs in the temple markets were like thickets of bamboo. If you paused going over a bridge, a dozen arms pushed you forward from behind.

Bodies were the spokes in the wheels that made the city roll. One day I’d watch a pack of girls learning a new dance. The next I’d catch acrobats in front of the theatre somersaulting to bring in the crowds. Boys flew kites in the riverbed and even the courtesans got out to play on festival days, batting at shuttlecocks. These bodies were my father’s subjects. His brush was alive with them. Skeletal old men, tubby children, winsome girls, monks in prayer—whatever moved attracted his eye, and the movement went straight from his eye to his brush to the paper.

Carpenters and bricklayers heaved up their loads in the streets, adding storeys to our cramped buildings. The old ways cramped us too. We could not be contained. Even scarred Shino in her verandah with its wooden pickets would rise again. She would have a blind moneylender for her lover.

I saw how life was punishing and how bodies took the brunt of it. At the fishmarket I watched an exhausted old man drag his lame leg, dodging the brown, healthy young ones as they tossed a giant tuna back and forth. His wife tidied the shellfish on their cart: she was smaller than me, but her hands—scarred from the shell edges, gnarled and swollen-knuckled—were brilliant, arranging frilled shells in exact lines. Those wrinkled fingers flashed; they darted like swallows, showing their ugliness only when still.

Women’s bodies swelled like fresh fruit and withered just as fast. In the public bath I watched covertly as the married ones took off their clothes. After the evenness of youth, female bodies gave away to folds of flesh, rolls in the thighs, scrawny ribs. Yet each woman was proprietary, scrubbing off her dead skin, patting her pink, moist folds.

If he had nothing else, a man had his own body. A woman too had her body. At least until she took an adult shape. Then, most likely, a man wanted it. If he took it, he gave it back worn and used. I watched these things and, perhaps without knowing, decided that I would be the kind of woman men did not want.

M
y own body was dressed again in girls’ clothes. I was fourteen and ugly. So everyone said. My jawbone was wide, breaking my face out in a diamond shape. My chin protruded with a round knob. They called me lantern-face. I worked in the North Star Studio. I was the errand girl for Hokusai.

The day I remember, I had gone with him to the bookseller’s stall. I rested at the side of the street. I did this as often as I could. If there was dust, I drew in it with my toe. If there was mud, I used a stick to make my lines. If there was paper and a brush and ink, I made sketches from life, just as he did. This day I wandered off and hung around the fruit seller with her trays of watermelon until she gave me a piece. I slurped it down, and the thin, red juice drooled down my cheeks; I spit the black seeds up into the air. Shino would have been scandalized by my manners.

I stood for a while in the crowd gathering in front of a man who sold perfumes. “Almond blossom,” he shouted. “Almond blossom.” The sweet, delicate smell was lost in the charcoal fumes from the yakitori stand and the sweat that rose up amongst the bodies. Then I went back to listen.

My father was showing Tsutaya his new work. He’d made a design of a boat harlot, slumped in a corner and wrapped in a black headscarf. It was meant for an album of Edo courtesans. These were the lowest of the low; they worked in the cold, damp anonymity of the canals. The blacks and reds were deep, saturated on the paper.

“I don’t think so,” pouted the publisher. “It’s so dark. Anyway, we don’t need more courtesans. It’s more difficult every day to get these things by the censors.”

That annoyed me. The truth was I’d painted in the colours myself, after Hokusai made the outline.

He brought out another: Tipsy Beauty. The courtesan was drunk and leaning over a black lacquer box. I’d had a hand in that one too.

Tsutaya laid a heavy hand on my father’s shoulder. “You’re bound and determined to show the dark side. Fine, if it suits you. But I can’t sell ’em. Not like this. Not unless I find a real connoisseur.”

I went to the back and watched the woodcarvers; if the publisher bought our designs, these men stuck the paper to the cherrywood to transfer the image, and then cut the lines into the block. Their carving tools were crescent-shaped or knife-straight, in sizes from baby finger to fist. The carvers were tucked cross-legged into low desks, digging out tiny bits of wood and blowing them off the edges of their knives, cutting the fine lines of our writing as well as every sensual curve of the figures. I marvelled at their dexterity. They nodded silently to me, never losing concentration.

When I came back, I could see that my father hadn’t made the sale.

“Why doesn’t he publish you anymore?” I said.

“He’s afraid I’m bad luck,” said Hokusai.

It was his good luck that had made Hokusai bad luck. His good luck was that—with Utamaro gone—he was now the most famous artist in Edo. How you could be both famous and poor was still a puzzle to me, but that’s how it was. His bad luck was that he was popular with foreigners, and the publishers suspected the authorities would turn on him. The Dutch were back in Edo, kept secluded in their strange house with its windows above eye level. Patient crowds stood along the bridge opposite. Every day, reports went out about who went in and out the tall door. Scientists and students of rangaku. Famous actors and courtesans, even Hana-ogi. It was she who sent word through one of the apprentices that Hokusai’s old clients were again looking for his work. The opperhoofd wanted to see him.

“Tell him if he wants to see me, he has to come to the North Star Studio,” said my father.

I
don’t know why he insisted on entertaining important people at home.

Our studio was like the scene of a crime.

It was only one room, identical in size to the adjacent room, where we lived. At least we no longer slept on the same mat. We all had separate mats, but they lay side by side, touching, around the hearth. In the morning we ate our food on the same spot. There were two of us females, my sister Tatsu and I, and the boy Sakujiro left at home: my older half-brother had been apprenticed to Nakajima the mirror polisher. It was the same family my father had been apprenticed to once, but he had not taken on the work, or the inheritance (another stick my mother used to beat him). Still, the Nakajima family remained curiously interested in us. Although my father—thinking himself too good to stand in the long hallways of the castle and rub the bronze so it was perfectly clean at all times—had flown in the face of their generosity when he was a boy, my half-brother had been conscripted to do the job. His labours brought in a little money—more than any of ours would have—so no one complained. My sister O-Miyo had married one of my father’s students. Tatsu and I worked in the studio. My mother took Sakujiro to school. The boy was her greatest pride, and he knew it.

The “studio” wasn’t big to begin with, just six tatami mats in size. The sides were packed with chests holding prints and studies. There were always students working with us, sitting on the floor or at low desks, drawing from life. There were chickens, monkeys, and rabbits in cages around and about. Someone usually had a bird in a cage or a fish in a bucket, and the cats—my pets—were always prowling and ready to pounce.

It was noisy too. O-Miyo returned to us by day, bringing her crawling son to the studio with her. He poked the cats with sticks and spilt the paint on purpose and laughed. I did not like that boy.

The work took over everything, and it brought us nothing: that is what my mother said. My parents still fought. My mother would not give up. She could not believe she wasn’t going to get what she wanted. They fought because my father was bad about keeping track of money. And he spent it on his own entertainments, whatever they were—painting parties, a little gambling. Nothing out of the ordinary, but she felt he was cheating her. And so the noise of their shouting added to the screech of the caged birds and the sound of O-Miyo scolding her son and my father’s mad, crazy laughter.

He kept us entertained. He painted with his left hand and with his right. He could paint above his head or, by reaching between his knees, on the floor behind him. He made paintings with his fingernails, laughing while he did it. Just now he was writing a book called Strange Food. He played around with rice, soups, sake, tea, cakes, vegetables fresh and dry, crustacean eggs, and he sang this little song about sake:

At first the man buys the sake.

Second, the sake buys the sake.

Third, the sake buys the man.

There is no limit to the way sake leads to disorder.

I
T WAS AUTUMN AND THE WIND BLEW
the fragile awnings—
bang,
bang
—against the shopfronts. The Mad Poets sat outside the teahouse by the Asakusa temple. I had a slate with me and was practising my characters. In the road, a thick figure appeared, wrapped up against the cold. Sadanobu. Again. The artists followed him with their eyes.

“Why does he come around here?”

“He’s haunting us.”

“Maybe he’s ready to publish his novel.”

But the jokes were thin.

“Maybe he too is frightened,” said Sanba. “He wanted to make history. But history makes itself. And it will not make him look pretty.”

The wind came down through the housetops and made the lamps swing. The glow passed over Sadanobu’s face, uneven, orange, white, then gone. It passed over all the other faces, simplifying them, making them stark.

“I do believe he wants to tell us something,” said Sanba.

Sadanobu moved in closer and, in that curious way of his, placed his body at right angles to become a silhouette, a caricature—soft paunch, hard chin, big nose. He took no notice of the jibes. His voice was low and reasonable. “I come to give a warning. A warning for the one they call Hokusai.”

The Mad Poets were not to be intimidated. “There is no one by that name. Hokkubei, Hokuba, Hokutsu, Hokuta? I don’t know who you mean.”

“There was an artist of that name, but he sold the honour to a student.”

Sadanobu appeared to laugh, silently, into his large belly. It rose and fell.

“Hokusai should know there are laws against giving details of Japanese life to foreigners,” he said.

Then he moved on.

I looked at my father. He took a drink. It had come. What would we do?

Nothing, apparently.

T
HERE WAS A DISCREET KNOCK
and the studio door slid open. Father became alert, showing no sign of recognition but going slightly pink.

It was Shino.

Her long, thin face had become sharper during her days at the low-class brothel. The scar on her cheek had healed and sat just along her jawbone, almost invisible. The great bundle of hair wrapped on top of her head and pierced with several pins seemed to have stolen the energy from the rest of her body. The wide sleeves of her kimono and a thick obi dwarfed her figure, but the narrow lower skirt clung to her legs and pooled at her feet. She still looked too genteel for the life she led.

How had she come out of the Yoshiwara? She must have been on business, but what business?

I went to her. I had not seen her for months. My father snapped.

“Ei! I asked you to look at Mr. Bohachi’s drawing.”

“I did. It’s not very good!”

The master gave an elaborate shrug. But he couldn’t hide his smile. “Do you see,” he said to Shino, “how she becomes more and more like me?”

“I thought I would take Ei to the bath, if you can spare her,” said Shino.

Tatsu and O-Miyo looked annoyed. They minded my special treatment.

“Why should she be excused? She has work to do.”

“She will discuss work with Miss Shino.”

“Why always Ei?” muttered Tatsu. She scowled as I edged to the door.

“You are too old to whine, Tatsu. Get to work,” said my father.

A
nd we were gone. At the feet of the bridges mendicants were chanting and holding out their bowls: “Praise the Sutra of the Lotus. Praise the name of the Founder.” They brought with them a scent of country air; they had parcels of mountain herbs tied around their necks. A mad-eyed soothsayer crouched with both fists holding a long bowl between her legs. “See your future,” she called. Shino dodged her, refusing apologetically.

“I don’t want to see my future,” she said. “If I can’t change it, why should I be warned?”

When she said that, I imagined the worst.