The Ghost Brush (62 page)

“Oh, no!” John tugged his beard. “You don’t learn.”

O
f course not. Book people would never change tribes. I laughed along. It felt good to be back amongst them. I hadn’t recognized it in Rebecca right away. I’d thought she was a bit upmarket. But I think that’s just the way they are in the twenty-first century. She was one of us, for sure. Floating world inhabitants. Bobbing like corks in the stream. Good times and bad. Full of caustic commentary on the authorities. Scroungers sometimes, but survivors always. Occasional runaway hits were the billows that carried them along. Mostly it just got harder.They launched into a long complaint about rents and prices and reading habits and competitors: it made me positively nostalgic.

“
I can’t believe we’ve sent two kids to college on the proceeds of this little store,” said Karen, running her hands through her long wavy hair. But the book trade was changing, and they thought they’d have to move. “So tell us more about these pictures. What brings you here?”

Rebecca talked about the Hokusais. Or she tried to. “It was overwhelming. His whole long career laid out. Prints we’ve seen before, but then the paintings . . . So different. So intense. I can’t wait to hear what the scholars are saying. And this weird thing happened where I thought I heard—” She stumbled. “I actually heard a voice—” She took another gulp of wine.

“Hearing voices? Probably leakage from somebody’s audio guide.”

“I didn’t think of that.”

They all laughed, Rebecca uneasily. They sauntered one block up to her old street. The house was there, same colour trim, same wrought-iron rails on the stairs. It was like the old days, but it absolutely wasn’t the old days. She felt flipped up in the air, blown around and set down again, several decades having passed, in the same spot.

3

The F-Word

SATURDAY MORNING THE NEW SMITHSONIAN ANNUALS
were dug firmly into the soil. Rebecca sat on her bench and watched a handsome Japanese in a navy blue suit with spectacles down his nose and a fat briefcase walk briskly to the wrong door. Collector for Mitsubishi? A rumpled, blond-haired man was casual with hands in pockets but made the same mistake. American academic? Numerous young Asian women in stilettos appeared, and a big guy, very straight-looking, who could have been military. Interesting crowd at this symposium.

She went in herself and got a nametag and a folder with an agenda. She grabbed a coffee and a bagel. A certain buzz was in the air. Everybody knew the experts were there, and the experts knew they were on show.

They all filed into the auditorium clutching burgundy folders.

The first speaker was a small man who kept his thin neck strained and his head high. His ears reached out like cupped hands: a keener. He reminded them that the late works of Hokusai had not been put before the public since
1893
.

Amongst the careers of great artists, Hokusai’s was noteworthy for being long—he started work in his teens and kept going until he was ninety. Seventy years as a working artist, an advantage of about forty over everyone else. He was hugely prolific, creating perhaps ten thousand works. Some even claim twenty thousand are his. But there are significant difficulties in identifying his work. The presenter showed a scroll painting on the screen. A small boy is seated in the crook of a willow branch, gazing at Mt. Fuji. A river like a ribbon ripples beneath him. The boy’s back is to the viewer, the mountain soars, and the tree winds its way to the top right corner of the picture. The background of the painting is empty space.

“This is one of the tricky ones,” said the speaker. “At first it was thought to be by Hokusai. Then not. People thought it was too sentimental to be by the master. But now I understand it has been reattributed to him.”

An obscure peasant who made an indifferent start and achieved greatness through hard work, Hokusai has been called “the Dickens of Japan” and his portrayal of working people compared to that of the American muralists of the
WPA
in the Depression.

Born in a suburb of Edo in
1760
, he was apprenticed to a mirror polisher for the Shogun. But he scorned that security. As a teenager, he was a bookseller’s delivery boy and a wood carver. He prospered in an atelier but fell out with his master. At thirty-seven he was selling condiments on the street. At forty-seven he was the best-paid artist in the city. At fifty-seven he was broke, and so it continued, feast and famine, mostly famine. A few letters to his publisher remain: “No money, only the clothes on my back, ready to work!” He used thirty different art names and moved home ninety-three times.

“Ninety-three?” said Rebecca to her seatmate. “That’s more than once a year.”

Ukiyo-e artists were commercial and plebeian, which meant that they had no patrons or indulgent collectors; they had to paint what people wanted. What people wanted were scenes of the Yoshiwara pleasure quarter, festivals, actors, wrestlers, and sights. For years, Hokusai co-operated. But he had an inventive genius. He took students by correspondence and published instruction books—really a jumble of sketches called manga—in many volumes. He also produced quantities of shunga—erotica, or “laughing pictures,” as they were called—at two periods, early and again later, when he was past sixty. The shunga were almost never exhibited, our sense of propriety being far greater than the Edoites’. He painted private poetry cards for the kyoka poets—the Mad Poets. He illustrated novels.

He was popular in his day, but the knock against him in art circles has been that he was a man of many styles who was master of none. That does not take into account his late years, however.

In
1826
, Hokusai was sixty-six and at a career low. He was fed up with painting Edo and the people of the pleasure quarter. His second wife had died. His homely, divorced daughter came home to look after him. He suffered from a palsy that left him unable to walk. He was said to have cured himself with Chinese herbs and praying and exorcism. When he first saw a convoluted landscape threaded through with pathways and bridges, in a dream, he thought it was indigestion. “But it didn’t go away, and finally I painted it,” he wrote his publisher. With a long wooden staff called a bo to steady him, he took to the roads.

Those travels inspired the series Thirty-six Views of Mt. Fuji, the most famous “view” of which was The Great Wave off Kanagawa. It lives on in a thousand incarnations. But the fear has gone out of it. To understand it, you have to look back to his era, a time of terror, of censors and military enfor-cers of feudal ways. If that didn’t get you there was poverty, rampant disease, and natural disaster. These were tiny people under huge powers.

Thirty-six Views did sell well, but changed nothing. Hokusai and daughter lived together in untidy poverty in their series of temporary rooms until he died. The Wave rolled on, finding its way out of the closed world of Japan to Europe. Debussy was inspired by it to write La Mer. Van Gogh collected. The Impressionists were ga-ga. Even after Hokusai’s death his fame grew, until he became the best-known Japanese print designer in the world.

I
t’s a story that begs many questions. Why—when he had periods of great success—was he always poor? Why did he keep moving? Why did he seek refuge first in the little seaside town of Uraga, coming to Edo only in darkness, and later in the mountains of Nagano? Was he always, as this man suggests, “one step ahead of the censors”?

And then there was the question of the unevenness and extreme variations in style of his work, especially at the end of his life. There had always been imitators and forgers; now people talk of disciples and wonder how he could have painted so many and produced so much in his last decade—producing hundreds of works in his eighty-eighth year—and who took on the unfinished work when he died.

No one knows. He left nothing. His wives died. The artists of the floating world were so lowly they barely existed in the official record. Much of that record was destroyed anyway, as wood-shanty Edo was subject to countless fires and earthquakes, and finally the firebombing of the Second World War. Hokusai himself was especially elusive. He new-named himself dozens of times. He added messages to his pictures, but they appeared to be in code. And anyway, almost no one today can read the pre-modern Japanese script.

O
ne who could was the last speaker of the morning, John Carpenter from the Sainsbury Institute in London. He came up onstage, good-natured and ready to share what he knew.

He screened Hokusai’s frontispiece illustration for Eishi’s 36 Immortal Women Poets: a road scene, with porters and men clambering up into the hills. It had no women in it and appeared to have nothing to do with poetry. He asked the audience what they thought. What made this an illustration of thirty-six immortal women poets?

No one could say.

Carpenter explained. Hokusai was showing the male poets hastening off the scene, leaving the Palace of the Immortals to the women. And not only have they been sent packing, but what are those packs they are carrying? Children. The supplanted male poets now have to look after the kids.

Everyone laughed.

“You see how Hokusai’s sense of humour would be upsetting to a neo-Confucian feudal society,” said Rebecca to her seatmate.

Carpenter also showed one of Hokusai’s surimono, a painting with poetry written on it. He read the words in English and then in Japanese.

By a smouldering flame

I’ll draw closer to you

With leaves of words soothing

As puffs of leaf tobacco.

Rebecca loved it. It sounded like a bohemian world, more like Montmartre or Shakespeare’s London than feudal Japan!

I
loved it too. I hovered, still. The words were a creaky door into that old world, pushed open a few inches, just a few inches. One more verse let a little daylight through: Carpenter showed a print of a
wakashu,
the male sophisticate who visits the pleasure district with his sword, ostensibly to dally with the women. But the text told a different story: “More so than the maiden flower which is charming from the front I prefer the purple trouser plant best seen from the rear.”

Rebecca was now grinning merrily. But this was tame, I thought. If you only knew, lady. There was far more where that came from. I was amusing myself recalling the bawdy verses from my days in the sake houses when Carpenter quoted from a surimono about a pine tree and the moon:

This coming spring

I will break off a branch

Of the katsura tree in the moon—

And the reply:

I’m seeing the same face I’ve not seen before.

My laugh turned to a lump in my throat. It was my turn to look over my (smoky) shoulders. How had that little piece of work turned up? There was no accounting for what survived, what was gone. Here was a moment, a memory from that other world I called my life: my father and I, teasing each other, on the page.

Carpenter said he believed the poem to be a duet by Hokusai and his daughter Oei, referring to the fact that she was getting divorced and coming home to her father. “The same face I’ve not seen before”—did she have a child? Or was it just a way of saying she’d been away?

I was dumbstruck. Someone mentioned me.

I
T WAS THE LUNCH BREAK
. With a schoolteacher from Arlington, Virginia, Rebecca wandered over to the sculpture garden of the National Gallery. A dun-coloured bird fluttered near the restaurant, singing along with the jazz on the music system. His leg was banded. Where he was going? From south to north? He called insistently. Was he trying to attract a mate? Or was it a she, trying to distract people from the family nest? Rebecca felt strange. Her senses were heightened. Everything was subject to interpretation.

“Why are you here?” said the schoolteacher. “Are you an art historian?”

“No,” Rebecca said, “I’m not. Not at all.”

Which wasn’t an answer. Why was she here? She wasn’t sure. She loved the prints and picture books of the floating world. She had since childhood. A grand old sea captain known to the family had been one of those who’d rushed to Japan when it was “opened.” He bought brocades and Buddhas and, in a casual way, woodblock prints. His daughter became a dealer. A few of the prints had come into Rebecca’s family. Her parents hung them in their home, on top of the snow-lit riverbanks of Edmonton, Alberta.

It was the weather that fascinated her first: snow lining the torii arches and piled in soft white layers on umbrellas; rain slanting in torrents; burled yellow clouds and mischievous, whirling winds. It was the women walking in clogs with bare toes through snowdrifts six inches deep.

She marvelled too at the hard labour: men with balled calves and scrawny, muscled buttocks with timbers on their backs; bearers of giant wrapped burdens toiling over a mountain pass. And the crowds—the city streets massed with tiny round-headed folk pressed shoulder to shoulder. She studied the pictures closely enough to figure out who those folk were—actors and wrestlers, carpenters and farmers, teahouse waitresses, begging monks.