The Ghost Brush (32 page)

“I see,” I said, and I was beginning to.

“I hid my compass in my hat,” he confided. He was so proud of this contraption that he showed me the tall black felt with its pocket inside.

“Compass in your hat!” I was amazed. “Is it a brain you wear outside your head? Does it help you think?”

The Dutchman did not laugh. “I don’t need help in thinking. Only in measuring.”

He was marvellous to look at and so curious. And I thought he was good. He wanted to do good. But he lacked caution.

“It will not go unnoticed,” I murmured, my face bending low in front of him.

“Unnoticed by whom? Your authorities allow me to do what I wish. My curiosity arises from my great respect for your people,” he said.

“It is not for people to be curious.” I used a term that meant a lowly person.

“I am not lowly,” he said. “I am a scientist.”

“The laws . . .” I began and bowed again.

“These laws are not serious. They exist, but no one pays any attention to them.”

He elaborated.

“Laws,” he spouted, “they are ignored. For instance, the law against smuggling. Everyone knows the opperhoofd goes out and comes back laden with trinkets. The opperhoofd is not searched.” The doctor made a joke. “When he arrives back at Deshima he is very fat. Then he goes to his chamber and disrobes, and suddenly he is thin.”

I laughed because he seemed to expect it. I said that he had learned to speak Japanese well. I asked him how he had done it.

“Hanging on the wall in my toilet I have a copy of the poem children use to memorize the syllables.”

I cackled at the picture this conjured.

He looked startled at my outburst, but so was I. Why so frank?

“In my sleep, I work on vocabulary,” he said.

“How?” Hokusai would be interested in that. If he could figure out how to draw in his sleep he would do it.

“I say word pairs as I’m drifting off.”

We were suddenly struck dumb. Our conversation had got off to such a fast start; it had hurtled, and now we were embarrassed.

The doctor suddenly seemed to wonder about me.

“Are you married?”

“Yes.”

“Did you choose the man you married?”

“I chose him after I met him in my father’s art classes.”

“This is unusual,” he said.

“My father knows me well,” I said.

“Did you study in the classes too?” he asked.

“I did, when I was younger. But now I teach the classes. My father is very busy. Hokusai had decided it was my job to pass along his method.”

Silence. I could have told him more about that, but he didn’t ask.

“Are you married?” I asked him.

“I have a Japanese wife.”

It was a puzzling answer. Yes, he was calling her his wife, but at the same time he was saying she was Japanese, which seemed a qualifier. “Does that mean yes or no?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said stiffly.

“Do you have a Dutch wife as well?”

At this he laughed.

“No, Otaki is my only wife. We have a child. I love them both very much,” he said.

I was charmed by the way he said that. I knew no man who spoke of love so simply.

The doctor wanted famous views of Edo. He wanted festivals. He wanted pictures that showed our rituals. He wanted these in watercolour. I agreed that Hokusai would paint them. We settled on a good price. In exchange, he offered to provide us things from Europe. I said, as courtesy required, that we wanted nothing. Then von Siebold mentioned the colour beru.

Ah, now that was different.

I knew this colour. We called it Berlin blue. It was a new blue from Prussia, very expensive, very strong. It had appeared in our markets only a few years ago. Painters in Osaka used it for actor prints. Here in Edo, the rebel disciple Eisen was using it on fans. He was clever, that man. The grains of the pigment were very fine, and it printed more smoothly than our dayflower or indigo. Our blues were fugitive—they faded. But beru was long lasting.

I told the doctor that beru was too expensive. We couldn’t even afford it for a painting, where we would use a very little. For a print it was unthinkable, because of the quantity we’d need.

“No, no,” he said. “It can’t be true. Nothing can be too expensive for the great master.” He wanted to give me gifts. Though I demurred, again for manners, he produced a little beru right then. And some Dutch paper. And a pencil.

As I made my way back through the twilit streets, a little more lurid as dark grew, with performers japing, drums beating, hawkers insistent at the end of day, I wondered why he had given me the pencil.

I think it was because we had spoken of painting in the Western style, and of the straight lines used to draw buildings, pillars, and furniture. Von Siebold’s draftsman used a pencil, and he thought Hokusai might use it to make his paintings.

But I used the pencil. First I held it lightly and reverently in my hand, knowing that his long, slender fingers, his surgeon’s fingers, had touched it. Then I began making lines with a straight edge to draw in the scaffolding around my figures. Over the pencil lines I used the watercolours. The results were mixed. I had asked Hokusai to paint, but he would not.

“These are for the Dutch doctor,” I reminded him.

“You do it, and get the students to help,” he said. “Stupid foreigner. He won’t know the difference.”

25

The Gift

I RETURNED WITH PAINTINGS
. Von Siebold smiled more kindly on me each time I saw him. He cleared the room of his learned hangers-on. We fell into conversation, as if we’d done this often.

He liked Sudden Shower: the peasants bracing themselves as a cloudburst broke over their heads. It was a common enough scene in Japan, but he didn’t know that.

“An instant so fleeting only a genius could have caught it,” I said, showing him the gestures of self-protection against wind and water, the onslaught so frequent in our land. I enjoyed the charade. It was a picture Hokusai had designed but left to me to put in the colour.

We discussed my father’s genius. So unconventional! How refreshing his vision was; how, of all the Japanese artists, Hokusai was the one whose name would one day be known in Europe.

Von Siebold’s secretary wrote down the particulars of the sale. The doctor smiled warmly at me, which gave me the confidence to ask my question.

“You are a learned man,” I began.

He nodded. No argument there.

“In England,” I said, “there was a great writer, name of Shakespeare. Do you know him?”

He was surprised by my topic. “Any educated man knows the works of Shakespeare. We studied him in school.”

He struck a pose.

“‘What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and motion how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals!’”

Oh, he was like an angel himself. It was the one word of English I understood. I clapped my hands. It made tears spring to my eyes, that man reciting the strange words that rolled and tumbled together. The secretary chuckled. I had never heard the language before. Sanba loved Shakespeare; that’s how I knew of him. Perhaps a few of his plays were read here, by the scholars in Dutch. But Sanba was no scholar; he was a scavenger of names and fame, and knew nothing of the man’s work, only that he was great.

“That is wonderful,” I said carefully. “Can you tell me about the man?”

“What?”

“Can you tell me, for instance, if this Shakespeare had a daughter?”

I don’t know what question he had expected next, but it was not this one.

“A daughter?” he said. “He has been dead two hundred years.”

“Yes,” I said, “but . . .”

“Little is known about his life.”

One of the other Dutchmen in the room came and spoke in von Siebold’s ear. Perhaps he understood my question.

“It is possible that he did have a daughter,” said von Siebold.

I smiled. “And she wrote for the stage also?”

No need for consultation this time.

“No.”

“But she helped him with his writing?”

“No, no.”

I was shocked and disappointed. “Why not?”

“Maybe she didn’t know how to write.”

“The daughter of the great master was not taught to write?” I had thought these Westerners were highly civilized.

“I doubt it. Shakespeare was a simple man from the provinces. This daughter, assuming there was one, may have learned to sign her name. Or maybe to write simple things, like a list of her possessions.”

“She would not be required to help him with his work?” I had spent many hours imagining this woman. I felt certain she existed.

A light came in his eyes. He thought he understood me. So I was interested in the role in her father’s life taken by this mythical daughter. His smile became broad.

“He went to live in London and left both wife and daughter behind,” he said gently.

“Oh! But how did he manage without her?”

He tipped his head. He spoke as if not wanting to disappoint a child. “We are imagining this,” he cautioned.

“My father,” I said, and I knew I had given myself away but threw all caution to the wind, “my father had three daughters. Still not enough.”

Von Siebold laughed. I laughed with him.

“Of Shakespeare’s daughter, we have no information,” he said firmly.

No information. I was stunned. I had not imagined a great life for her. Only a little one. But not that fate. To be utterly unknown. To have one’s labour for the art forgotten. To have one’s very existence in question.

“England is not like here. Shakespeare’s work was not a family project.”

“Not?” I didn’t believe it. I sat trying to absorb it.

He was clearly puzzled. “What did you think she did?”

Sanba had talked about the great dramatist of kings and wars; the kabuki actors discussed him too. He wrote many plays, and to do that he would have had to have a daughter at his side. She might have helped with the work if he went out of town, on the road or gathering information. Or if he had too much writing to do at once, he would lay out the pattern and she—

“No one but the great man himself could have written the plays,” said von Siebold. “No daughter, even if he had one, had anything to do with it.”

I saw he had missed my point entirely. “Of course,” I said. “And she would never have said anything but that that was the case.”

He looked at me keenly.

“It seems a waste.”

A dubious smile played around his lips. Was I teasing? “A waste of what?”

“Of her great talent.”

He looked blank.

“In Japan we make sure that such skill descends in families,” I said.

“Anyway,” he said apologetically, “there is no such woman. We don’t know that she was ever born.”

I kept my teeth covered, as they were bad. My time was up. “I am very grateful for your thoughts.” I bowed. I promised to be back. I left, disappointed but somehow stirred inside. I had not realized how backward these Europeans were.

I traipsed down the street deep in thought. Since I first heard Shakespeare spoken of as the man who understood great and small, I had likened him to the Old Man. He taught his daughter to write. When a child she was made to do errands for her father, and she did them willingly because she understood his art better than anyone. He shared his insights, his rages against the world. He was not a worldly man, because his head was in the clouds, and his daughter became sharp with tradesmen and competitors who would have cheated him. In this way the daughter was a true disciple, and always loyal.

Because Shakespeare-san was difficult. The master could be some kind of asshole; they often were. Had the daughter been of the same temperament as he—unwilling to please for the sake of it, hating pretense—she would have had to hide it. She would perform duties for her father not because of deference or duty but because if she didn’t, the work would not be produced. The work was their livelihood. And she believed in its worth.

But this daughter—all right, if she did not exist, then perhaps I would have to speak of myself—this daughter herself was capable of great work. But she rarely had the time to concentrate on it. The more she helped Hokusai, the greater he became and the lesser she became. As he grew greater, she grew older. That was the real question. When would it be her time?

W
ORD CAME FROM THE NAGASAKIYA
that von Siebold had a gift for us.

I went to pick it up.

“For your father,” he said. It was a supply of the paint called beru, the vibrant blue that did not fade. In quantities enough to make anything we wanted.

I touched the packet. I rubbed the fine, fine particles between my fingertips. As the primary grinder of pigments in our house, I was fascinated. It would save me a great deal of work. It would also make wonderful sky and sea.