The Ghost Brush (49 page)
Whatever lived inside those ferocious bones snaked up to the stars leaving a dragon’s tail of white smoke.
The Chiming Bells
AT FIRST THEY LEFT ME ALONE
, which was what I wanted. I slept, I woke up, I missed him. His groans, which had been frequent; his crazy laugh; his ghastly visions. No one came around, not even Monster Boy. Maybe he had got himself killed by his gangster friends because of his gambling debts.
Yet I heard over me the nasal, rhythmic series of syllables that I knew from my father: “Myoho renge kyo. Ho ben pon dai ni. Ni ji se son. Ju san mai
an. Jo ni ki.”
Sometimes I joined in.
“The wisdom of the Buddhas is profound and cannot be measured. Its gate is hard to understand. And difficult to enter.”
I woke up. Had I got out of bed that day? I wasn’t sure. I forced myself awake, drank stale water, stumbled outside to the toilet, splashed my face at the well, and stumbled inside again. My eyes were bleary, but I thought I saw a nun in a white headdress sitting beside the mattress.
“You must not fight it; you must allow yourself to be sad,” she said.
“I’m not sad,” I said. I lay down and pulled my blanket up to my eyes.
“You always say that. But you often are.”
That made me cry.
“Stop trying to hold on to time that has gone by. You must let things go.”
“I have let everything go!” I protested. “What are you talking about?”
I slept, and woke up, and drank tea, and she was there.
“Come with me,” urged Shino, “to the monastery in Kyoto. The old capital. You can live by the chiming clocks and paint.”
“I can’t leave. I have to lie here. I have art under the mattress.”
She laughed. “That’s the worst excuse I’ve ever heard.”
But I was afraid it would be stolen. I told people that I saved my father’s filthy mattress out of respect, but really it was my safe place.
“I can’t leave it.”
“We’ll take it, then.”
Shino helped me to roll the papers and silks and place them in a long cloth bag for travelling.
“I can’t leave my cats,” I said as a last-ditch attempt to escape this journey.
“They will be fine. They’re too fat anyway, on her garbage,” she said, pointing to the unagi seller.
I roused myself to do the courtesies. I made a gift of Hokusai drawings to Tosaki, the man who made the sweets my father had loved. I thanked everyone for their gifts. Someone had been sending chestnuts. What did I do with those chestnuts? I didn’t remember eating them. I wrote to Iwajiro, my student in Obuse, giving him instructions so he could continue his work.
There was work to finish, work that would be signed and stamped “Hokusai, age 88.” I had the seal in a small bag tucked in my kimono sleeve. When I undressed for the night, I hid it in the tangerine box that still graced our wall, with the little statue of St. Nichiren. The other seals, fancifully saying “Hokusai 100,” I did not have. Isai maintained that my father had given it to him.
I went to find Yasayuke the storyteller. He was at the foot of the bridge, half-buried in a crowd and dishing out futures with abandon. I pushed my way between the people and shook his arm. “I’ve come to make you an offer: stay in my tenement for a few months. I’m going on a pilgrimage.”
He did not like a roof over his head; he was not used to it. He shook his head and whined. There was crusting under his eyes.
“You know it. Beside the well,” I said. “Next to the unagi seller. She’ll feed you. There’s charcoal to burn in the kotatsu. It’s already autumn; in winter you’ll be glad of it. Let the cats sleep inside when there’s frost”—I spoiled them—“but not the apprentices. Tell them I’ve gone travelling.”
S
O WE WENT BEGGING, SHINO AND I
. We stood by the side of the road and Shino played her flute. At the
sekisho
she explained that she was going to her mountain monastery; I was her sister who had suffered the loss of her ancient father and must pray for him. The guardsmen were not interested, and we passed.
“Do you see?” Shino was exuberant. “How easy life is because we are no one?”
Shino begged so graciously that our bowls were never empty. By the end of a day we had enough coins to stay in a pilgrim’s inn.
It took us seven days to reach the pass. As we climbed up the hill, water ran down beside us. We passed the grey milestones with characters carved in them. The sun whitened the tile roofs in the post town. We begged two backpacks with woven cloth straps to go over our shoulders. A gutter led the water over a wheel from which it fell, silver onto stone, making a gentle chucking sound. “It’s a steep hill for old ladies,” said a man as he dropped a coin in Shino’s bowl. Pching!
I heard clear sound for the first time in months. Until that moment I had heard only through the din of my pain.
That evening we sat on the stone benches beside the road. Shino’s music warbled. I stared into the fugitive blue hills. I could see far into the distance, where peaks were misted and whitened. The world was coming back to me.
In the moonlight Shino swivelled and darted in her white hood, glowing like a ghost, and it made me laugh. She practised her kata on me. She pinned me to the ground in about three seconds. Two old ladies. I was fifty, and she was nearly sixty. She still looked fierce.
“I hope you never use those fighting manoeuvres on me,” I said.
In the daylight Shino bowed her head modestly and talked to me of religion. “We must be honest and gentle. We must be merciful. We must be respectful to our fathers and husbands. We must be patient.”
“Are these not rules designed by men to turn women into perfect helpers, wives, and mothers?” I said. In Buddhism, women had to follow all the same rules as monks, but also an additional set for “feminine morality.”
“You may not like it, but it is a way to freedom,” said Shino. “You must learn to dissemble. And not with that sulky look. You must let them think you are entirely in their hands. And you will have freedom. Don’t you see? I have only myself—and the spirits, who pay little attention to me.”
Autumn deepened every day. In the post towns, the houses ran in unbroken dark lines on either side of the road, their red tile roofs wet with rain. Horses whinnied in the stables, and daimyo retainers pulled their reins. Shino’s feet were blistered, but still she played her flute, and in the darkness she moved in her strange patterns using the sticks as weapons. Together we performed the demon-queller kata with long feathery grasses, slashing forwards and backwards and swirling.
We took the turning away from Obuse towards Kyoto. I had never walked here before. I came out of my stupor enough to realize that she too had lost him. I examined the smooth face for the sadness that must be there but found none.
I
N KYOTO A MONK IN DARK BLUE ROBES
roped tightly around his waist and a sedge hat that hid his face seemed to be calling my name. “O-eh, O-eh.” His hands were folded across his chest over a prayer script. He and his roaming partners repeated this as they walked in circles. They gathered, then disappeared down an alley. When they’d gone I could hear the birds.
Shino told the abbess that I was a famous artist in Edo and the daughter of the great departed master. I was given a room.
I became a visitor to temples.
Alone in the gardens of the Zen temple at Ginkaku-ji, I walked. I had been walking for weeks, and now it had become a necessity. The sky was thick with threatened snow. The trees lay thin shadows on the gravel. These were the gardens of a long-ago Emperor, built for his rest when he had finished his rule. I heard the chanting of the monks, like the grumbling of a low, many-footed, many-throated beast. It was soothing, if you were in agreement. Like everything in my world.
How had the Emperor walked? Hands clasped, head down. He didn’t need to watch his feet: nothing was allowed to be in his way. Why should he look? He had seen it all: moss beds, rocks like sundials, still ponds where carp sip the air, in and out of shadow. Rocks dappled with lichen in green and grey. The red blossoms that fell overnight and the gardener hastened to remove, bowling himself flat before the great footsteps, nearly face down in the walled-in transparent stream.
What did the Emperor think about?
The people. Surely the Emperor thought about the people.
But did he know who we were? That there were many of us, and that we were restless? Did he think about how to keep out the foreign barbarians?
I went to Eikando Zenrin-ji temple. This was the temple of the Shogun. I saw the gate by which he entered. I looked beyond the wall to see the path where the Shogun walked when he visited this, the Emperor’s city. I wondered, How did the Shogun walk? What did he think about?
I supposed he thought up new rules. How to keep us spending so he could collect taxes. How to keep us afraid. How to stop the rumours. And of course, how to keep the world away from our shores. These things must have been on his mind. We artists, the actors, half-people that we were, dumb animals that we were, used all our ingenuity to outwit him. And often we succeeded. But he! He had to always invent more ways to keep us in line. How difficult for him.
I went to the temple famous for the Eternal View. It was chock full of monks chanting. The lead monk kept time with his mallet, striking a wooden tablet. They too were saying my name: “do o do eu do ei ei ei.”
What were they praying for? And what was my father praying for all that time, chanting the Sanskrit words he never understood, but for whose sake he turned his back on friends and would not greet them?
His immortality, I supposed.
But the man had turned to ash: I was the witness.
I went to Nanzen-ji Garden. This was for the abbots. It was my favourite, with the sand cone tickled by its broom in the morning. And perfect, perfect, with the moss carefully groomed, picked clean of every single stray blade of grass that got into it. Under the moonlight it had a mystic gleam, as if it were inhabited by light.
This was how the world was meant to be—for them: Emperor, Shogun, Abbot. Towering. Awe-inspiring. Calmed. Unchanging. But for us, the lowly people, change was all around. Here in the imperial city samurai wishing to restore the Emperor clashed with those wanting to open the country to the West. Sometimes a body was displayed, a crackdown overnight, a nest of rebels found.
I found a rosary soothing. Day after day, I shirred the beads between my thumb and fingertips. Shino took me to her own hidden temple in a mountain gorge a little way above the city. Unable to act as priests in Kyoto, the nuns practised their devotions there. They believed that animals, rocks, and plants had understanding. I smirked to see them bowing to a goat, but then thought better of it. There seemed no reason not to respect a goat. Certainly I respected cats.
There was an old slippery monkey tree that had cracked open; its trunk gaped. In the cavity a pine tree had taken root. The pine grew straight, but old, dead branches of the slippery monkey entrapped it. The young branches pushed through the holes where branches once had been. It was protected: lucky. But misshapen, disguised: unlucky. I saw that this pine tree was me. I had been inside the monkey tree, trying to push past the dead arms of the father.
There was a poem in that temple. I memorized it, and on my homeward journey I chanted it too, along with the Lotus Sutra.
The evening bell, solemn and bronze
In the grandfather temple down the hill
Sounds dimly here.
Slow beat of the mountain’s heart, perhaps,
Or determined pulse of pine tree (gift of the birds)
Growing out of a crotch of the slippery monkey tree.
All one, perhaps—bell, mountain, tree,
And steady cicada vibrato
And little white dog
And quiet artist-priest, carver of Noh masks
Fashioning a bamboo crutch for the ancient peach tree,
Symbol of strength, symbol of concern.
W
HEN SPRING CAME I WRAPPED THE PAINTINGS
of my father’s last years in the travelling bag and tied it on my back. The new paintings I had made, exorcisms in their own way—of cats, goats, trees, potatoes, anything that was alive—I wrapped in red cloth and presented to Shino.
“You will return to the world,” she said.
“I will.”
We said our farewells. I did not know if I would ever see her again. She was old, and I . . . I had nothing. But I wanted out of my monkey tree. I wanted to be an artist in my own right. To live by one brush.