The Ghost Brush (72 page)

“I need your help.”

“Ah,” he said, “but I am not well. Did you know I had a bicycle accident and hurt my back? No? Yes, very bad.”

“Another accident? Or the one you had a few years ago?”

“Maybe you already heard. Yes, it was some time ago,” he admitted. He tried another tack. “Did you know I am very busy? So busy.”

Rebecca told him what she was up to. He closed his eyes as she spoke. Yusuke was the editor of a small newspaper for Japanese Canadians. He interviewed subjects and wrote stories. He was also a professional storyteller: he stood onstage and acted out folktales from old Japan. He had very little time to do translations. He rubbed his eyes continuously and began to shake his head. He put the glasses on. His eyes were suddenly large and open.

“You want to write a story set in Edo? Based on a real woman? You know everything was destroyed,” he said sternly. “So many fires in Edo. So many earthquakes. The records are gone. And the ones that we have”—he sighed—“the old-style writing. My eyes are very bad. The characters are so hard to read.”

“I know,” she said. “I know.”

He sighed mightily and ran his fingers through his thick hair, making it stand on end even more. “You might as well try to invent the time machine.”

“I know,” she said humbly. “But I feel sort of compelled . . .” Her voice trailed off.

He tried again. “Forget research. You don’t need. In the Edo period, they had everything we had. Everything. Just remember.”

He moved a pile of papers from one side of his computer to the other. He pulled his chair in and then pushed it out. She stood by, very quiet.

“I know about Hokusai, but I never heard of a daughter. Only last week I read a catalogue—no daughter.”

“That’s just the problem.”

“You give me very large trouble,” he said eventually. Then he agreed to do a little—a very little—looking around. She left him looking sorrowful.

S
EVERAL DAYS LATER YUSUKE REPORTED
. He had scoped the Internet in Japanese. He had read a
manga
about Hokusai’s daughter. “That Oei was a gloomy, dry, homely woman who failed in her marriage. She was not impressive character. Except for a few incidents.”

“Like what?”

“Ei visited her stepmother, whose daughter was seriously ill. The little girl begged Ei to sleep over. Ei complied. The girl went happily to sleep with her sister. The next day Ei returned to her place of work. Her co-worker asked, ‘Ei, who is that little girl beside you?’ ‘What little girl?’ said Ei. ‘The one at the door.’ There was no little girl, so Ei became frightened and ran back to her stepmother’s. There she found her little sister dead on the futon.”

“That’s fiction.”

Yusuke shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe not. I think it’s possible that the author read about this incident somewhere. Research.” He smiled: gotcha. “One thing is positive. You know she just walked off.”

“What do you mean?”

“She tucked her brushes in her sleeve and said she was going to the sea. And she was never seen again.” He paused for emphasis. She remembered he was an expert at telling stories. “I think Oei was a little bit witch,” said Yusuke. “Have a nice day.”

R
ebecca was not put off, as he had hoped she would be. She wasn’t even surprised. She discussed it with Andrew while he washed the dishes. That was their deal: she cooked, and he cleaned up. Sometimes she helped by drying the pots, as she was doing now. It gave her a chance to declaim with a dishtowel extending the range of her flying hands.

“Here was a woman who displeased the makers of history. Never mind that she painted well, helped her father in his studio, nursed him in his old age—and that she was a better painter of Beauties than he was. She was gloomy and divorced! Write her off!”

Flap went the dishtowel up above her head.

Andrew smiled into the sink.

“I tell you, they just pretended she didn’t exist. If a disciple named Kosho could draw Hokusai and Oei together in his studio in their habitual poses and still maintain that Hokusai was working alone, then what other explanation is there?”

“I must say,” said Andrew mildly, turning off the tap, “I like the sound of Oei. If she disappeared without a trace, maybe it was on purpose. Maybe she was a little bit witch.”

S
o this was her man. I warmed to him. It was the nicest thing anyone had said about me so far.

10

The Mad Poets

IT WAS THE EIGHTH MONTH
, and one of those warm days before the cold set in. The Mad Poets group sat on the bank above the Sumida. My father was there, with Tsutaya the publisher, Utamaro the artist, and a jack-of-all-trades writer called Sanba. Sanba had the best cosmetics store in Edo; he sold the white lead paint the actors put on their faces. That was handy because he wrote plays. He also wrote critiques of their performances. As well, just to keep it all going, he sold a popular elixir of immortality that he had invented. He made a lot of jokes and kept the others laughing. There was also Kyoden, author of yellow-back novels, which he sold along with smoking materials at his tobacco store. And Waki the tattooist, who now made beautiful little drawings and poems.

The courtesan Yuko carried a telescope; she kept lifting it to her eyes. It was trained on the distant racecourse at the edge of town. She murmured the name of the horse her lover had bet on. If it won, her lover would buy out her contract and free her. She believed that. She was silly and a bit pathetic but not a bad poet.

Like a courtesan’s

vowels the green strands

of a willow tree

stretch out extra long.

It wasn’t true what the brothel-keepers said: that people did not want to hear courtesans’ thoughts. Courtesans were very stylish. All Edo was keen to know the details of their lives in the Yoshiwara. And everyone went there, even though it was forbidden. They came in disguise, people from all walks of life. The pleasure district was a great vat of soup that way, and even though the bakufu insisted that the higher classes disdain us, it turned out that the samurai wanted to mingle with merchants and their daughters found it exciting to sit down with peasants.

Because they were so strange, these proximities were titillating. Waki the tattooist sat beside Akemi, a merchant’s daughter. Her father was paying the bill, which meant we had plenty to eat. Everyone was drinking wine from stemmed glasses, making like Europeans. They were planning their next publication: the poets would write and the artists would illustrate a book, which the publisher would print. It was all very convenient.

Below us in the riverbed were wide, dry spaces on either side of the water. A dance troupe had set down a mat, and the women were tuning up their instruments. Soon they would perform. From our position on the bank above we had a good view.

I rolled in the weeds listening to the cicadas and the crickets. Their lifetime was nearly over; soon cold would silence them. When anyone looked at me I crossed my eyes. That wasn’t very often. The Mad Poets were completely involved with themselves, timid when sober but now drunk and boasting. The serving girls were about my age and didn’t want to wait on me. The poems were always about sex. “More so than the maiden flower which is charming from the front I prefer the purple trouser plant best seen from the rear.”

It was my father’s verse that made the poets laugh: purple trouser plant, ha, ha. I laughed along with them.

Hokusai looked up as if he’d just remembered I was there. Did he think I was too young for little rhymes about woman-fleers? I made a face at him. Give me a break, Old Man. I heard this kind of stuff all the time. It was nothing to me.

He went back to his composition.

I decided to make a painting. I got a brush and paper and painted an inlet with a little sailboat crossing it. I wasn’t very happy with it. Something was wrong with the distance and the shapes. I couldn’t make it appear on paper the way it was in front of me. I took it across to my father, who showed me how to correct it. He sat up and paid attention then.

“Now make a poem that goes with it,” he said.

I started writing something about the opening being narrow, and when they saw it they laughed even harder. Their minds are nowhere but in the gutter, and I told them so. “That’s not what I meant,” I said. “I am ten years old.”

“You are ten years old when it suits you,” my father said. “And when it suits you better, you are twenty.”

I told him I had no idea what he meant, izn it, and he told me to stop talking like a courtesan; I certainly did have an idea what he meant. I said, in the voice of a nighthawk, “Hey, hey, Old Man. How about it?”

Everybody laughed. I felt pleased with myself.

“Has she no innocence, your daughter?” said one of them.

Hokusai just looked at me as if he was seeing someone new.

“Look at the beautiful hornets,” said Sanba, adeptly diverting him. “Yellow and black, with such long legs. Watch they don’t sting.”

“Too bad we’ve already done a book about sex and insects.”

“The book did well,” murmured the publisher.

“Without me it would have been nothing.”

“You are so arrogant, Utamaro, my friend.”

“I am arrogant because I am the best.”

“You’re not the best. You’re only the most expensive,” said Tsutaya.

“Publishers who buy cheap get what they pay for: the books won’t sell, and they’ll go out of business.” It was true; Utamaro was on top. No painter in Edo could touch him. The common people loved his paintings. The bakufu did too. Even the Shogun’s women loved his paintings, so Shino said. My father tried some in his style, but if you asked me (which he didn’t), no matter how good those were they were still nothing but imitations of Utamaro.

“You won’t be the best forever; new artists are always coming up,” mused somebody.

“You mean those idiots who peek out from behind every screen in every brothel? Who crawl the streets like ants?” the great man droned. “They try to make up for want of brush power by dressing up their models in gorgeous costumes with painted faces. Whereas if I do a simple ink sketch, with the power of my brush, what I create will live forever.”

Downriver from us, a humped bridge with many feet, like a caterpillar, rose over the sluggish water. On the high point, you could just make out a thick, heavily clad figure on horseback in the midst of the men with their swords. A daimyo’s retinue was crossing.

“Look who’s coming.”

Everyone looked. It was Sadanobu. Sad-and-Noble, they called him. Famous author of edicts. Hater of the Yoshiwara and our lifestyle. He who—in the storyteller’s tale—punished the famous yakko. Was it our yakko? She wouldn’t say.

“No matter. He’s not important,” said Utamaro breezily.

Sadanobu had been councillor because the Shogun was a child. Now the Shogun was grown up and had taken over. As it happened the Shogun was more corrupt than we ever were. Things were back to normal.

“He can’t be ignored. He’s still got power.”

“I wonder what he does with his time?”

“Keeps busy with his martial arts. It fills the hours when he can’t make rulings.”

“If he makes more, so what? We’ll break them. Look at how many times they’ve ruled that there will be no publication of news. Notice how often Kawara-ban comes out?”

The little broadsheet and the criers who ran ahead of it announcing news had somehow survived the crackdown.

“The bakufu are cats—just choosing their moment to pounce.”

“I’ve been pounced on once,” said Kyoden. “That’s enough. Thereafter I became a mouse: obedient to the Way.”

Sad-and-Noble’s men had come to the tobacco store and bought a copy of his yellow-back novel about life in the pleasure district. The councillor had read it himself, they said. Then his men had come back and arrested Kyoden. Kyoden was the leader of the literary world. Sad-and-Noble decided to make an example of him. He was sent up to the White Sands for questioning, and his old father too.

He was charged with making ukiyo-e and depraved books.

Kyoden suffered his punishment of fines and manacles, and he became even more famous. His book disappeared for a while. Then it came back into print, even though the blocks had been burned. But he didn’t write satirical books anymore. At least not very often.

“Obedient? Is that what you call it? Gutless is what it is. You make moral tracts,” said Sanba, “and once in a blue moon pop out a racy little novelette. You can’t have it both ways.”

“Why not?” Kyoden was grinning. “Sad-and-Noble has it both ways.”

“He’s not so bad. He started a savings bank for the poor. And during the rice riots he released rice from the merchants’ hoarding places. He was even lenient to those who’d been caught doing violence to their betters.” Waki said that.

“He hates us, though.”

“That’s because he’s jealous.”

Yuko brought down her telescope. She pushed out her tiny red lips and breathed a mournful “who-who-who.” Her lover’s horse had not won the race. “My hopes are dashed.”