The Ghost Brush (48 page)

More fireworks arced over our heads, bursting with the accompaniment of the roars of the crowd. Below, on the moving water, the boats rocked in their straight lines as people stood to watch.

“He is angry because he is dying. And you are not.”

It began to snow, the flakes spiralling down from a great height, past our faces, falling to the water. I patted my friend’s arm, grateful for his presence.

We said goodnight. I would walk and walk as the night gave way to the dawn. At first the snow melted away into blackness when it hit the road. But it kept falling. When I reached the temple at Asakusa, snow was catching on the branches of the pines and there was glittering ice underfoot.

37

Un-daughter Me

BUT IT WAS NOT MY FATHER
who died first. It was Eisen.

So he too was gone, my great friend.

The year did not improve.

My father became more frail, and more insistent. He lay all day on the thin mattress we had unrolled on the tatami mats and now never rolled up.

One day was worse than the others.

I called the boy to get the doctor. Shino had given me money, which I had hidden from Hokusai so he would not spend it on sweets or throw it at a vendor who came to collect. The doctor came.

“There is nothing to be done,” he said. “It is old age. It cannot be escaped.”

Later Hokusai woke up. He began to beg. He could do so much, if the gods would only give him ten more years. He could become a great artist. He begged for ten, then eight, then, wheedling, even one. One more year, and he would become great.

It broke my heart to hear. He could get everything he ever wanted from me, but the gods were not at his beck and call. Immortality was not to be granted, not in this case.

I sat beside him and listened to him bargaining with the gods.

“If I can’t go on as Hokusai, I agree to become an elephant or a blind man, a turtle or a fox.”

“A fox is good.” I said this to ease him, but he was angry. He turned on me.

“Hereafter my failures will all belong to you, Ei. And your success will belong to me.”

What could he mean? But I knew. That his bad works would be understood to have been from my brush, and my best would be assumed to be his. And it was probably true. I dared a sardonic laugh while I admitted as much. That set him off.

“In my next life there is one thing I will not be: a father. This link of me to you will not survive death. This tie will die. I will be free of you!”

He wounded me. “Die, then!” I said. “I shall have no father. Die and thereby un-father me,” I sobbed.

“I shall, and un-daughter myself.”

We were silent for a few minutes. Then he thought better of this plan and tried to win me back.

“But what am I without Ei, my daughter? She brings my tea. She knows my stories. Every picture I draw is carved not in wood but in her mind. She came from me . . .” But he couldn’t stay on this positive line. “From all the wasteful seed. The sons and daughters. Of all of them, why this one?” he raged. “This aberration, this woman-not-woman.”

I hid my face so he could not see my grief. He spoke to his god.

“Of all my deeds, the one to engender her outlives me.”

Eisen’s words helped me. My father was angry that I would live, to paint, while he would not. I steeled myself against him.

But then, he would weep. “I ask forgiveness. I regret what I have done. My greatness took away hers.”

He went silent and I thought he was asleep. But not.

“Ei,” he said, “you have time. When you are un-fathered, break loose and go on your own path.”

“What is my path?” I said. “How will I know it?” In not letting me sign my name he wrote me out of history, which he liked to keep for himself.

I had sworn to Eisen: “He will take me to the grave with him. He makes me old before my time.” Is the grave my path? No, it will not be.

“Do it. Go ahead. Die and un-daughter me, then.” I whispered that. But what would I be? What would the world be without my father?

The disciples came to watch over him, dry-eyed. They bowed, and waited, and watched the breath rise and fall in his chest. Then one by one they left. I saw the ones whose veiled eyes confirmed that they disliked the fact that his greatest disciple and his closest relative were one and the same, and a woman.

“Chin-Chin! Come to me. Write it down!”

He had composed his jisei, his farewell verse.

Though doubtless only as a ghost

Yet evenings sprightly will I tread

The summer moor.

In Obuse he had worked on this simple verse too. There, it had another line to it, which now he forgot. It was:

And frequent visits to Japan of foreign ships.

A strange line, and one that ruined the poem, but I knew why it was there. It was the release he waited for. Now he knew he would not survive long enough to see it.

I dreamed that Eisen came. His whorish old face with eyes puffed from drink gazed on me like an old nurse. “I loved you,” he said. “At least I think I did. But you were spoken for.”

“Love!” I said. “I would like to take up again this subject of love. I think it is nothing but a rat’s fart in a windstorm. And you can quote me on that.”

I
ASKED THE BOY NEXT DOOR
to bring tea. When it came Hokusai was someplace else in his mind.

“Die, then, Old Man, and un-daughter me,” I told him again while he lay and seemed not to hear.

In an hour, I thought better of that. Un-daughtered, what was I then? What was the world without my father swaggering ahead along the road?

“Old Man, you went ahead of the crowd. They didn’t forgive you that. Not the censors, not the Shoguns, and especially not your fellow artists. By the time they caught up, you had moved on.”

He smiled at that.

And me—I came along forty years after, myself. And these trappings of the world became my story. Trappings! Who called them that? An excellent word. I was trapped! The daughter in the service of her father. His dominance, his sensuality had overrun the boundaries. There was the faint echo now, of his animal presence, and of the three of us daughters in the studio. Father.

The judgmental thing I feared in him, I saw in myself. He had to exact perfection from himself and others. He did not accept that perfection was out of reach. He hurt people. Shino. My mother. He hated any deviation from his precious path—he showed no compassion for others. I stood over him with my head cocked to one side, as if listening to a voice from elsewhere. He neglected me, fought me, but never discarded me. I was all he had.

I loved him.

I
T WAS DAY
. I heard the voice of the fish vendor. “Eel to sell! Fresh from the market. Swimming in the marsh one hour ago!”

All night I had watched him grow more beautiful. The face so thin that the skin clung to his skull, translucent like hot wax around a lit candle. The thinking part of him was moving out, vacating its space, ceasing to know. I took his hand. He begged forgiveness for his failings, and then he asked me to carry on making pictures.

He had spoken of wanting every line to be true. He had begged for just ten more years. He would continue striving to paint the truth.

But I knew the truth he sought was nothing. It was a phantom. An idea of perfection. Phantoms appear in different guises to us all, and that was his.

I told him he would be reborn as a tiger, a tiger in the snow.

I held his right hand. It was unchanged: large, square, wrinkled, firm, so infinitely, invisibly capable that I was in awe. Could all that skill die in an instant? Surely not. It had taken so long, so very long, for every inch and cord to learn its canny powers. I was calm; he was calm. We had not had many such moments. This is the tragedy of death. It was bringing the peace we had ruined with our restless lives.

He squeezed my hand, my finer hand, and gave one more tremendous “Hah!” The hand went still and he was gone. Like that.

I kept the hand in mine a long time. Then I grew tired and lay beside him.

And now it was day. People began to arrive. Although I had told nobody, they knew. “He’s gone,” they said, peeking in. They had felt his spirit travel on. Bounding, they said, across the fields.

It was the eighteenth day of the fourth month—10 May 1849 in the Western calendar. The plum had been and gone, and the cherry blossoms too. It was a beautiful day to be dead.

I am writing to tell you that my father went to his rest today, in the morning. He was peaceful and willing to go.
[Lie.]
He is in our lodgings as we prepare for the funeral procession tomorrow. I hope you can be with us.

The visitors left their coins folded in beautifully painted paper. I sent the boy to buy a plain box for his ashes. Neighbour women came from the tenements. They sat beside me sewing his death clothes of bleached cotton. I smiled with them at my clumsiness. “She who paints but does not sew” was sewing. I washed his body myself. We dressed him, and the apprentices put him in the coffin. Katsushika Isai was there and Kosho. They jostled for position around his corpse.

I found brushes, ink pots, and rolls of paper. I took the powder of some of my deepest pigments and tucked them in small cups. These cups I wrapped in fine paper. I wrapped all of this in a cloth and tied it at the top. I tucked the package beside his body.

The priest came from the temple and chanted the Pillow Sutra by his side.

T
hat night people kept arriving. They brought soba noodles in broth, his favourite dish. It was important to be merry, and I was. I heard my voice, echoing in the silence where his had been.

When they left, and before the dawn, I began to paint. I wanted to paint a beautiful lantern for the procession, and that is what I did. As my brush moved of its own accord, I mourned. There had been no luxury, no ease in our life, and none in his death. I had not objected to this, as my mother had done. To have done so would have been to break faith with my father. But now, for this day, I wished for one formal kimono to wear, just once in my life.

In the morning a temple messenger came with a large box: a kimono and all the attendant belts and ties. “The nun left it with us for you. It belonged to her when she was a married woman.” It was lavender with purple iris and red-headed cranes.

The women dressed me, tying the wide obi in place. Outside the procession formed. I had made many models of funeral processions with the keshi ningyo dolls. I knew the order by heart: first lanterns, then paper flowers and fresh flowers, and finally caged birds which would be released later, to bring merit to him. Then came the incense burners and the memorial tablet covered with thin silk, and finally the coffin.

“This shabby quarter has never seen so fine a funeral,” said the unagi seller.

We fell in line. The disciples one by one—Katsushika Isai; Tsuyuki Kosho; Hokuba; Sori III; Suzuki Hokusai II; Taito II, who had travelled from Osaka when he knew my father was failing. Takai Kozan sent his representatives. And simpler folk: those in the quarter from whom we bought the skewered fish and the charcoal for the kotatsu and the sandals. Tosaki-san, who made the famous sweet that Hokusai loved, was weeping. My friend Yasayuke the storyteller. Shino, of course. Samurai and priests and scholars, and yes, court ladies. Even the bakufu were present.

There were the publishers and artist friends in their suspicious droves, eyeing one another. They had buried Hokusai ten years ago. But now, finally, he was stilled. Death had caught him. It had caught his friends first, and his wives and most of his children too. Only I was left.

But no, there was family: Sakujiro and Tachi; even the dreadful Monster Boy, crying crocodile tears.

We were one hundred in all when we walked the short distance through the tenements on the temple grounds to the old quarter of Umamichi, one mile away. They said that only male relatives should carry objects, but I insisted. I carried the lantern I had painted. At the temple we set our items on an altar. We offered incense and the priest chanted. We handed out sweet bean jelly in shape of lotus flowers and leaves; that was our obligation. Certain people who were not members of the funeral party pushed in amongst the crowd and got sweets, which they took away outside to sell.

My father would have put it in a picture.

After the funeral we carried the coffin to the cremation spot outside the city. I walked behind, carrying the certificate from the temple, a permit to burn. We arrived: the coffin was put in the oven, and the door was sealed and my paper stamped. We waited until dark. Firewood made a weak fire and cremation a bad smell, so it was always done at night.

Into the fire he went. I gaped. It seemed too soon. The flames leapt on his small offering. I hated it. It was his very life, not even one day ago. Who could be sure he had truly departed? Never would I allow my own bones to be burnt.