The Ghost Brush (75 page)

“For your own good, Utamaro!” jibed an onlooker.

“I take it as a compliment that my Big Heads are conspicuous.” Utamaro held his hand in a fist with the thumb sticking up. He jabbed this thumb into his breastbone.

A voice came from a bearded man in the back. “Do you think this beauty is a person of note?” Spies haunted every gathering.

“Yes,” said Utamaro.

“She is not. She is evil. She is temptation. Whether she is a courtesan or not. She is a walking cadaver. Beauties should be permitted in pictures merely to show how a man can lose his way and die.”

“We are all dying!” shouted Utamaro. “That is the sadness of existence. I have shown it in my—”

The bearded man pushed his table away and left.

I
reached my father’s side. The
ageya
manager, Etako, pushed her dogface into mine. “You brought the little girl to an evening of drinking and coarse humour? Shame on you!” she said to Hokusai.

But Hokusai had no shame. “I am a family man, you know that.” He grinned. Then he disappeared again.

Here instead was one of his friends. He had been at the Mad Poets picnic. It was the writer of satires who supported his work by running a cosmetics shop, Sanba. He bent to my level.

“Good evening, young lady.”

I turned my head quickly to acknowledge him and then looked away. I was concerned about my father. Everyone was laughing now; Hokusai had climbed onstage and was capering around.

“Will he get in trouble?” I said.

“Not if he behaves himself,” he said.

I hissed. He never did, especially not when he ought to.

Sanba pushed me to the front so I could see.

My father was showing off his new book, called Tactics of General Firebox. He had made the pictures and written the words. “In the far province of the west there is a great lord named Big Heart, having a revenue of a million tons of rice. His name is Lord Disorder. He loves all those things that give pleasure . . .”

Here he drew his hands in a curving manner, like a river flowing downstream alongside his body. He turned himself to face the back wall so he was visible in profile. He drew the curve out in front of himself, a sad bulge below the waist, a wide, flat chest, and a hard, dull profile.

I recognized the shape. It was Sad-and-Noble, the fat daimyo who had passed by us with his retinue as we sat by the Sumida. The room grew quiet. People shifted away from their neighbours. The men with little beards began to look extremely interested.

“And he loved sake,” Hokusai read on. “Not content with the pleasure of hunting in the mountains or fishing in the sea, he amused himself by making men swim with heavy stones attached to their bodies, or making them run with naked feet on ice.”

I could feel the tension in the room.

“That’s enough, Hokusai,” said Sanba. But that only encouraged my father.

Timid Waki inched up to the stage and took him by the arm. Hokusai shrugged him off and kept reading.

“Lord Disorder dressed his entourage in hot clothes in summer and thin fabric in winter.” He shouted now, “Silver and gold were in his hands, like water in a river . . .”

Waki looked for help. He found it in the big blind man. The masseur stepped up and, reaching in his general direction, caught my father by the scruff of the neck. My father kept reading.

Sometimes a child can do things a man cannot. “Hokusai!” I said, in my best yakko voice. “What a shame it would be if you gave away the ending.”

Hokusai turned sharply to me—I think I fooled him with my voices, for once—and the break was enough for the blind man to bundle him out of the light.

Waki returned to speak to the crowd. “Hokusai cannot read anymore. I am so very sorry. His words don’t make any sense; no one would understand.”

M
y father had vanished. I sat outside, swinging my feet and looking at the moon.

“It is late,” said Sanba, coming up behind me. “Are you tired?”

“No.”

“Is there someone who can take you home?” he said.

“Shino will come if she can.”

“Shino? And take you where?”

“Back to the Corner Tamaya.”

Sanba whistled. “You are very sophisticated. For a ten-year-old.”

“I am twelve now.” I said it scornfully, but I was pleased. No one had called me sophisticated before.

“Do you go to school?”

“My sisters go to the temple, where the priests teach them. But I—” I looked down in a show of modesty.

“You don’t go with them?”

“I already know a lot of characters. And Shino teaches me.”

“Impressive,” he said. He was staring.

I know why he was curious: my frame was small and undeveloped; I had no softness. I was still taken for a child though I felt quite old.

“And if Shino cannot come?”

“She will come.” It must have been the Hour of the Ox by then. “Unless she is engaged.”

“Something may have come up,” he said. He smirked.

I scowled. These jokes were so tiresome. I knew her work. It was no laughing matter. He looked repentant.

“Shall I wait with you until your father comes?” said Sanba.

“No.” I stood disdainfully and went back inside the ageya.

In the back rows, the artists were talking about my father.

“Hokusai is pushing his luck. What has he done this for?”

“He’s not usually so brave.”

“He’s a copycat. He copies Utamaro.”

“He copies anyone and anything.”

“He has a flair, that’s it.”

“Simply a flair. People notice him.”

“Yes, except for the bakufu. They don’t notice him.”

“That’s what he wants. To be noticed.”

“He will be. And not in a good way. You wait. The worst is that he sells his prints outside the country.”

“I wonder how he got that gig? No matter. They’ll get him for it.”

I went outside. I stood in shadow between the ovals of lantern light spilling on the outside wall of the ageya. I hoped I was invisible.

At first I thought about the blind masseur who visited the Corner Tamaya and gave Shino fish. I never hid my dislike of him. But he had saved my father from making bigger mistakes than usual by dragging him off the stage.

Why did he do that? He couldn’t have been a fan of his art. It must have been for Shino. So the blind man must have known that my father was important to Shino. How important? What did he know? Did he know me?

A kind act from this loathsome man could only be explained by one thing: he loved her. So much, even, that he looked out for his rival?

I did not understand love. Apart from my mother, who had no time for me, prostitutes and artists were the adults I knew. For them, everything was backwards. Duty filled their day, and love was what they bought when they had money. Many wished for the opposite to be true. Shino was sad, but she had hope. She would pay her debt. Others seemed to enjoy the backwards life and just went on and on.

Hokusai, although a man and technically free, was imprisoned too. I knew he loved our thin, goose-necked, long-nosed, sad-faced girl-woman. I loved her too. But he could not have her. It wasn’t because he had a wife. It was because he did not have money. He earned money, sometimes, but it flew out of our hands; I did not know how. Had Hokusai given up? Is that why he pretended to be carefree? Had Shino accepted it too? Maybe my father was not a rival to the blind man. Maybe—awful thought—the blind man felt sorry for my father. Maybe he had the compassion that Shino always said I lacked.

Hokusai would never truly accept the backwards rules of love, I thought. Hokusai couldn’t do that. He was restless.

And restless was dangerous.

I shifted farther from the door to the ageya, passing the well of light, finding the next patch of darkness. My father could not accept rules. One day he would get too tired to pretend, and he would go mad and break all the rules. Perhaps even today.

I was cold. The new year should bring spring. But this one had come with snow on pine branches and glitter ice underfoot. The moat winked in the darkness between the rows of brothels. It was a deep blue, almost black: the lamplight did not reach the water. There was a narrow curve of moon above it. And as I stared I realized that I had found my father. He was sitting in the fork of a tree.

He looked small, like a boy who could no longer stand all his friends’ bullying. He was yearning towards the dark, towards the place where it was silent, where no voice baited him. I started towards him and then stopped. That man Sanba was in my path.

“What do you suppose Hokusai is doing?”

“He’s worshipping,” I said.

“The moon?”

“No, the North Star. Myoken. The writers’ star. The star of the brush. It is one of the seven stars that make the Great Dipper. There.” I whispered, pointed, then I saw that he knew; he was teasing me.

“I didn’t know your father was a worshipping man.”

“Of course he is. We go often to his temple at Yanagishima in Honjo, where he was born,” I said, amused that Sanba would not know so obvious a thing.

Away from the row of lanterns the stars became brighter. There was smoke in the air; they did not hold still. They were intense, but they flickered. They were covered. Then, in a moment of clear air, they emerged overhead in waves and currents, like graceful brush strokes of light through the dark sky.

He caught my hand. “Let’s not disturb him,” said Sanba. “It’s a good hiding place.”

But I wanted to.

“Father!” I said. “Old Man!”

“Hey, you. Oooo-eei,” he replied, without surprise, or regret that he had left me, and without turning his head. “Come and look.”

I loosened Sanba’s hand. “Thank you,” I said. “You can go now.”

I climbed the tree and tucked myself in at the Old Man’s side. We stared at the dark sky as the night went on.

I
was a ghoulish child. It was the company I kept. But I was not gloomy; it was a glittery, feverish fascination with ghosts I had. I watched everyone flirt with death. I was always excited. I was difficult to tame; my spirits were high.

But that night of the new year I was wary.

I searched for one beautiful thing on which to focus my mind. And I could find nothing. Not the cherry blossoms on the boulevard—they were planted only for their blooming season, and then they were ripped out. I bled for those trees, that they could not put down roots. The yellow flowers too were hastened into bloom. Soon after, their thin stalks collapsed and they died.

Not Shino’s long, inquisitive face and fluting voice: no, now when I saw her face I thought of her in the Hour of the Ox, when she rose from her mattress, dark circles under her eyes, a washboard of bones visible on her chest where the kimono fell open, holding a lighted taper.

“Tie up your kimono,” I would whisper. “You look so cold.”

Her chin drooped and her hair overwhelmed its spiky pins and pulled to the side of her head. Her red undergarments showed around her ankles. If I showed pity it made her angry.

“You are not allowed to show pity! And not even to feel it,” she chided me.

My father said I was not to feel fear, and she said I should not pity: what could I feel, then? Anger. I felt it, but I could not hold on to it. If I felt nothing, what did that make me? A ghost?

This thought was agitating, and I twisted away from it, nearly falling from the crotch of our tree. Then I found it interesting and tried to get it back.

Perhaps I really was a ghost. How long had I been one? Who else was a ghost? Was my father? He was angry, yes, as he’d showed tonight, but his anger died. Then he was sad. Was it because he made things beautiful that were not, in truth, beautiful? And he did it so well! Beauty that pulled at the cords of the heart, the cords that ran down the back of the throat, beneath words, beyond words, straight to tears. That beauty owned him. It replaced flesh and blood. He would deny all of us and himself to serve that beauty.

I had always known it. I had learned in his arms. This art and the need to make it was stronger than love. But each time I saw the God of Art win, I had to learn again. And painfully.

Myoken was his master. His master said he need not eat when others ate. He need not sleep when they slept. He need not paint what other people wanted. He must paint what he was driven to paint. He must not perform the act of creation strictly for money, or for our convenience. He must dance to the master’s tune.

And for all that, for all his laughing and carrying on while he did it, he never seemed to find pleasure.

I fell asleep leaning into my father’s side.

S
anba was standing under us.

“Hokusai, it would be good for you to disappear for a time. Utamaro has been arrested.”

My father’s arm tightened on me. He was silent for a minute. Then he called down, “So you tell me. And do you know what I answer? I feel for my friend. But how can I disappear? I am not a spirit, nor a demon! I am flesh and blood.”