The Ghost Brush (39 page)

A feeling of festivity came over the studio. I lit a pipe. I drank sake. I watched Hokusai, full of stories, wagging his head, putting on a show.

“It’s all that beru,” I said. “It’s made you into a boy again.”

“Nonsense. I am the Old Man. I am the oldest man in the town.”

He showed me his latest drawings for the Fuji prints. He was expanding the series to forty-six; after that, he said, he would do one hundred more.

“But will you be able to think of so many? And each one different?”

“I will, I will. I am young again, didn’t you say it?”

It’s true he seemed his old self. His speech never slurred. His eyes were bright, and though I was beginning to think of sleep, he bounced with energy. I had something to tell him. I had told no one yet, and it pleased me very much.

“See what I will be working on in the coming year?” I said. I held out the note. It was from the publisher Suzanbo. “He is asking me to do the illustrations for a new edition of 100 Famous Poems by 100 Poets.”

My father snatched the note from my hand and scanned it. “He has written asking that Oei do these illustrations?” he said. “And not her father?”

I cast my eyes down and set my head on an angle.

“There must be some mistake.”

Maybe his eyes were not so good after all. He had to read the note again and again. He looked up at me in quite comical confusion.

“Are you sure that is what it says? I don’t think so. I think they are asking you to arrange for me to do it.”

I had no need to look again. I had looked many times. “He commissions me.”

“But why? There must be some mistake. Why are they asking you and not me?” He seemed bewildered.

“Because they like my painting style, do you think?” I said dryly.

“Your style? What do they know of your style? I know your style. I am your father. Your style is the style I give you. No one else knows your style.”

Now he was getting angry. He flung the note to the cats. He puffed out his chest and blew.

“Suzanbo knows my style,” I said, as mildly as I could. “People know, after all. I have my students here. I am busy while you are out of Edo. Where is that note?” I retrieved it from my friends the cats, who had been pawing it. “He’s asking me because he wants to me to do it!”

“Oh, no. That’s not a good idea. I would do a much better job,” said my father.

“Different . . .” I allowed. “More expensive, for sure.”

“No. Better. Certainly better. For the waka poems? There is no question.”

I was angry. But I was not permitted anger. Anger belonged to him. I allowed my eyes to go dead.

Hokusai saw my feelings. He puffed a little more, and then turned with the pivot of his heel from child to stern patriarch. “You know, Daughter, that I appreciate your style. I have said so. But trust me in this. I’ll take this commission. Give me the note. I’ll write back to Suzanbo and do these myself.”

29

Laughing Pictures

MY FATHER APPEARED ONE NIGHT
.
Atanda, atanda-bate.
I heard him just outside the door. He came in but didn’t greet me. He circled the room, tossing up my cloak where it hung, looking for something.

“So it’s Eisen now, is it?” he said heavily.

How did he know?

“Don’t worry, Old Man. He’s not here,” I said, as Hokusai continued his restless search. I wanted our easy banter. But my father acted like a jealous lover.

He sat down finally and I got him tea. As he took it from my hands I saw that I was forgiven but still to be chastised. “Married, married. He’s married. You don’t learn,” he said.

They said Eisen and I made a strange pair. He was ten years older, a debaucher, a man of the town. I was the gloomy spinster and my father’s drudge. But how we laughed! When we could, we met at the theatre. He wanted to be a playwright. But his work was too full of explanations. I told him that. “There’s nothing to say. The actors just want to strike a spectacular pose, and to have many complications in the action. They don’t need your thoughts!”

I remembered too late that men don’t need my advice. I put my hand over my mouth. It was a gesture all women made to stop their tongues. Was I becoming coy as well?

“But, please, don’t listen to instructions from me,” I said. “My husband wouldn’t.”

“More fool he,” said Eisen, who knew Tomei’s work. “Please continue. I can’t divorce you, because I have not had the pleasure of marrying you. I would beg you to be my wife, but you would refuse me,” he said, gallantly. “I am a dissolute and a poor artist. And anyway”—I had wondered if he would mention it—“I’m married.”

“A minor detail,” I said.

W
ith Eisen, I returned to the teahouses. We drank and shouted and made rude jokes. The courtesans came and went, their soft hands wafting like smoke. The censors were dogging our tracks, making every kind of legitimate picture a crime. The men painted
shunga
for private customers. Eisen said, “Why don’t you do it too? Hokusai used to be one of the best.”

The sake drinkers laughed. “How could she paint them? She is a woman like a man. What she knows about love and sex would only fill a walnut shell.”

I smiled in what I hoped was a mysterious way.

“She has an imagination, doesn’t she?” said Eisen, pushed to defend me.

“That’s more than you could ever expect from any woman.”

I inclined my head to the side, on that sharp angle that could mean anything. But on the way home I was dejected.

It was Eisen who encouraged me. “They think you’re a manly woman? Who better to illustrate a book of laughing pictures? You know both sides.”

T
HE NEXT DAY HE CAME TO GET ME
as soon as night began to fall. We went to the market that had sprung up on the grounds of the Asakusa temple. We sat under a wooden awning at a little restaurant that sold Nara tea. This was tea poured over rice, a proper meal. The sake was not good, but it was cheap. Eisen seemed nervous. The serving girl knelt beside him with another serving of sake.

“Should you wish to undertake the shunga, I believe I can help you with your research,” he said.

It was a proposition. When we rose Eisen rocked back on his heels and reached for my elbow.

“Come,” he said. “We’ll go to my room.”

We hastened, wordlessly, down through the covered stalls, barely nodding to the other artists we passed along the way. What could we say if they asked us where we were going?

“You are so serious,” I said.

He was poking his hearth to get a flame up. His rooms were more elegant than mine. I stood, still wrapped in my cloak, which I had also put over my head and ears.

“Ei!” he said. “What do you do to me? You are not beautiful. You are not what a woman should be. You are not helping just now to stoke my fires . . . But I want you nonetheless.”

“I’ve heard it all before,” I said. “Until you get to the part about wanting me.”

He gave up with the hearth and turned away. Behind his back, a small orange flame jumped.

“It is the triumph of the intelligence over the merely carnal,” he said. “Was your husband your first? Or do I have some early deflowerer to match?”

“You do.”

He guessed. “Sanba? He was the age of your father, wasn’t he? Well, I am much younger.” He laughed at himself then.

The room was growing warmer.

He came to me and opened my kimono with his hands. He found my undergarment and loosened it. His fingers went down my belly. It was round and solid.

I put one hand behind his neck. He began to bow, his spine curling under my fingers. His mouth, his eyes, and then the top of his head brushed my lips. I pulled the kimono loose from my shoulders and pressed his head to one side. My nipple was standing.

“Where did you learn to do that?” he said.

“I didn’t learn it. It came with desire.”

His head moved over to the other one. “Same thing?”

My kimono settled halfway down my arms and chest, as it was tied around my waist. I had been initiated when I was barely older than a child. But that girl had died with Sanba. Now I was a woman.

“A woman with mass has a certain appeal,” mused Eisen.

He turned me to the back. His hands moved over my shoulders and down my spine, feeling each protruding knob of my backbone. My skin rose to his touch.

I wondered if it was possible to faint from desire. In a play it would be. “Perhaps we are in a play,” I suggested.

“I am,” he said. “I always am.”

He parted my kimono further, over my belly. I reached back to touch his. The belly was coiled as if a hairless beast slept just under the skin. I arched my back and pressed my neck into his chest. He put his lips on my nape and moaned.

“I will lose myself,” he said.

I parted my legs.

T
hat was the beginning of our two-brush production.

Eisen was a tall man. While standing erect, I could rest my head on his chest. With my father gone, he sometimes stayed all night. In the evening after work, he would drink. I had a little sake too. Then he liked to make love. I studied him: his feet, curled with muscle tension as he loomed over me; his face, that fixated stare men get as they approach their climax. He kept his eyes shut. I kept mine open. I examined his member, which I had not had occasion to study before. It was like a salamander, moving blindly with its smooth, wet head.

His thighs were lean and straight, much straighter than the average man’s, or than my father’s, which were bowed. His buttocks were not hard or round, but tucked under, a little wide and smooth. His chest too was smooth, his nipples dark, large, and flat. You had to wonder why he had them. His kimono remained on at all times, as did mine: my room was cold, and the erotic potential of our dress enormous. The soft material sliding away from your skin, opening, letting hot body parts meet.

I was full figured; he was thin. I liked his boniness. I liked his hard shins, his hipbones, and his elbows as they pressed against me, navigating my softness by feel, inching towards where he needed to be. He did not rush once he was there, which made me happy. I liked the pushing, and finally his arched flop; he looked like a fish that has been pulled from the shallows.

He was funny and he was available; we fell into the habit of each other. I was not in love, as I had been with Sanba—as I half thought, sometimes, I had been with the Dutch doctor, whom I had met for only an hour three times, five years earlier. Being in love was a foolish idea, as my father said—a fashion, a swoon courtesans used to distract themselves from the awfulness of their lives.

We shared no dreams or longing. With Eisen it was a coupling of needs with requirements. Freed from the urgency to please the man because I “loved” him, I did what I wanted. This was very different from giving myself, or submitting, or becoming limp and docile in the belief that it fuelled male desire. It was by accident that I found I could enter into a roll upon the mats with a cool head and all my curiosity intact.

“Why don’t you try pressing from the front?” I said when he pursued me at the back door. “Not inside, just outside, like that.”

“You have the tricks of a courtesan,” he grumbled, complying and laughing as he did.

“I know nothing! Nothing! I’m just trying to feel good.”

He told me about women who sat unmoved by men’s attentions, reading books while they were being made love to. But I was the very opposite. It was not disinterest but close attention that he saw in me. I was having ideas for pictures while we were making “love.”

I tried being on top, and he found that entertaining too. “I must make a note,” he mumbled as I let the breast of my kimono open towards his lips. “This is really rather good.”

The kimono with their happy, graphic possibilities heightened the pleasure. It was fun to feel as if I were in the pictures I had designed for so long.

T
ogether, Eisen and I took on a
shunga
commission. The private buyer could afford the fifteen pages of large canvas in four colours. He wanted a silly story under the title
Images of a Couple.
I remembered what I had seen as a small girl. With Shino in the brothel, I’d witnessed people rolling together, men mounting girls, girls’ feet in the air.

We were paid well, and for a time I had plenty to eat. I sent money by messenger to Uraga. We got more commissions then. I found my father’s designs for couples in love positions and began to use them. But my own way of seeing began to appear on the pages. My figures were rounder than Hokusai’s. The world was a fishbowl, and the man—whichever man—was on the outside, looking in. The woman was on the inside, swimming in it, knocking against the glass. Perhaps drowning in it. Their robes ballooned around them.

We made up a story about a courtesan and her client who went out on a date on the Sumida in a small boat with a roof. The man paid a tip to the boatman so he would let them take the boat by themselves while he waited on the pier. Eisen wrote the dialogue. I had to remind him to keep it short.