The Ghost Brush (87 page)

No one had ever bought me anything just because of a gleam in my eye. I ate and slurped and spat happily. As we waited, the kago-bearers pushed through. Sanba carefully took the watermelon rind from my sticky fingers.

“Here come the investors,” Sanba said. “If the play is popular, they’ll be rich men. Or they’ll be paupers. It depends on what I say.”

He gave his little self-mocking grin.

Out of their sedan chairs stepped the sleek, well-dressed men. They checked in all directions to see that their heavy coats were being admired, then shrugged the silk up their shoulders, shook out the folds, and faced the theatre. They nearly pawed the ground with their feet, so eager were they to get inside. I saw the investors’ pasty, broad-cheeked faces and knew they were very nervous. I thought one or two of them gave Sanba a glance.

“You see how a cosmetics seller from the wrong part of town can get a little power?” he said. “They recognize me. They want a good review. But oh no, no, no. My good opinion can’t be bought,” he said.

The front row of people pressed closer and closer to the verandah, where the shapely male dancers minced and flipped their fans. Guards came to push them back. Sanba pulled me out of the way. A manager crooked his finger at us from the side door, and we were in.

In our box seats Sanba’s knees were crammed against the barrier. Mine didn’t reach. Above us were wooden timbers and more boxes where women sat fanning themselves from excitement. Below was the pit where labourers camped out with food for the day. I looked down on a mass of turning, tilting heads, ear to ear and nose to nape—I couldn’t see between them. A long wooden ramp stretched overhead from the back of the theatre to the stage. This was the hanamichi where the great Danjuro would appear when his moment came. His fan club was going wild behind us. Actors, like us, were not officially counted as persons, but if Ichikawa Danjuro VII was not a person, I thought, he must be a very rich horse or cow.

Sanba bought me a booklet to explain the play. The paper was soft and the pages clung to each other. I held it to my chest and hoped he would let me keep it.

“I was going to take you to see a play of domestic realism,” Sanba laughed, “but I thought perhaps you had had enough of that.”

“Rude.”

“Instead we will see a play about severed affection. The plot goes this way: A woman declares she is out of love with her lover and urges him to discard her, but she does not mean it. She is doing this for his good. The lover does not understand her sacrifice and murders her. Her ghost comes to haunt him, with the intention of protecting him, but instead it drives him mad.”

I still went to storytelling halls when I had time. “I know a lot of ghost stories,” I said, “but that sounds more improbable than most.”

“Do you think so? On the contrary. Those reverses are all too familiar to me. You see, Ei, your father has not prepared you for life. You only know reprobates. You are sheltered from the disastrous hypocrisy and conventions of proper people.”

The story made no sense, but I loved the roaring, the postures, the applause, and the abuse. I watched the way the actors’ faces worked while painted white, with red lines across the cheeks. I forgot the dragging hours and lived inside the wrenching, overdone lives. When it was finally over and we got out into the tainted sunset, I felt as if I had two sets of eyes, my usual and a new set. I towered over my own body and looked down from above. Sanba and I had screamed and suffered as one. Now in the cold, damp air I moved closer to his body. And he pressed against me, once, and then moved away.

Would I like to meet the great Danjuro VII? Who wouldn’t? I climbed the stairs to the actor’s dressing room on the third floor feeling proud: everyone treated Sanba with respect. “Welcome, teacher. Come and see, give us your thoughts. What did you think?” they asked.

At the top Sanba called out. The door opened and there was Danjuro the man, diminished to a fraction of his size. The costume was gone, he was perspiring, and the makeup was tacky on his face. Sanba produced a cloth from the folds of his kimono. “Would you mark this cloth for her?”

The great actor took the square of cotton, opened it like a book, and laid it on his two palms, flat. He looked at us.

“I see sparks flying.”

“You see no such thing,” says Sanba. “This is Hokusai’s daughter. I am saving her from toil.”

Danjuro raised his painted eyebrows. The effect was large in the narrow doorway.

“I hear the great artist uses his daughters as models for the shunga—”

“That is mere gossip,” said Sanba shortly.

“Gossip!” said Danjuro. “Shikitei Sanba complains of gossip?” He laughed, and his laughter floated over us like a ticklish, escaped feather.

I reddened.

“Better to stop talking and give us your face print.”

“Of course. I am your slave, critic,” said the great actor. “What will you write about my performance today? Never mind. Don’t tell me.” He turned his eyes to me. “And what do you think of the play? Will it succeed?”

I had nothing to say.

“It’s not a great play,” said Sanba, “but that may be in its favour. There is an appetite for these ghosts. It is the times.”

“They take everything your man here says with deep seriousness. I see the audience reading his reviews even in my finest moment,” said Danjuro. He began to laugh, Sanba with him.

People called for Danjuro to appear. But he was in no rush. He held the square of cotton. Then rapidly and fiercely, the actor pressed his face into the cloth as it lay stretched out in the palms of his hands. He pressed the cloth into his face, and his face into the cloth, and held it very still. Then, in a moment, he lifted it. He passed the cotton to me. His features were on it. Eyebrows, nose, lips, cheek gashes. It was a print, a seal of his face.

S
anba and I went to a restaurant on a boat tied up along the river. It was dark and dank and narrow. I suppose it was a place where no one would see us. And that seemed important, all of a sudden. Angled walls—we were down in the belly of the boat—and dark wood made it cozy. Sanba lit me a pipe with a match string he held over the tip, and passed it back. I inhaled deeply and felt the smoke burn my throat and my eyes. I drank some sake. The owner approached; he joked about picking up women. He must have meant me. Sanba was apparently the expert. He had come here before with a girl. This delighted me: I was glad to be in experienced hands. The owner fed him more than sake and soya beans—he fed him questions that Sanba could dilate on for the entertainment of those few men slurping their noodles at the bar.

“Hey, Sanba, if I want to seduce a Buddhist nun, how should I go about it?”

“Confidently,” he said. “They are amongst the very easiest.” He coughed and downed more sake. “Women become nuns on impulse and later are hungry for male company.”

“But it’s against their religion.”

“Not at all,” he said. “If the Buddha cautions against sex, it is because most people develop attachments. To fornicate is sweet and good. Just remain detached and there is no harm.”

I swayed on my heels where they dug into my buttocks and sucked softly on the pipe. I loved the rough, scalding smoke in my throat. It was like doing myself a violence, but one of strange comfort.

When we had eaten Sanba said he would show me where he worked. We walked to a small upper-floor room; a futon was on the floor. But something that had been said earlier had not left his mind.

“It is true what Danjuro said, then? Hokusai uses his daughters as models for the shunga?”

It was true; we modelled, in a way. But it did not merit such shocked gossip.

“Then you are not entirely innocent?”

“Not entirely.” I smiled.

I was untouched but not unseen. If I had lost something it was a gradual loss and not one that was thrust on me. It was true—I had been research for the shunga. It wasn’t only me but also my sisters, when they were younger. We slept in one room. My father had seen our kimono open to reveal thighs, buttocks sometimes. My breasts, which hardly existed, and the buds and folds between my legs—all these had been examined.

I did remember my mother hectoring from the step-down kitchen: “Why bother the girls? Go to the brothels for that. Better still, you have a wife.” But she was always instructing my father, always finding fault, telling him in a shrill voice that he had done something wrong. This wasn’t any different. The voice simply announced that this examination of Ei or Miyo or Tatsu was an irritation to her, and while it might be a matter of convenience to my father, it wasn’t—what?—good manners, or in keeping with her ideas of current style, or a thing you did with your family.

But scandal? No.

I was willing to help. Lying on my back, my legs waving as if I were an overturned beetle, I laughed, and so did my sisters. It was all for the pictures: my father had drawn my parts with great precision, afterwards comparing them to pictures he had seen in the Dutch anatomy books then circulating in Edo. My mother, far from being old-fashioned, the way he accused her of being, had an idea of privacy that would exist only in the future. We lived in small rooms; we were all there together, day and night. We heard one another and smelled one another and saw one another. I took my sisters’ clothes. They stole my drawings. We all searched for the coins my father earned and lost.

I untied my obi in front of Sanba.

And yet.

It left me open. To him and to others. I had given something away before I knew I had it. I had to take it back so I could give it properly.

Sanba said to himself, “I seem to have made the decision to deflower Hokusai’s daughter.”

“Don’t ‘daughter’ me here,” I said. “I am Ei.”

“So you are,” Sanba said to me. “Relax.”

Difficult when under duress. “I’m trying,” I said.

“Don’t try, whatever you do,” he said. “That makes it worse.”

He touched me under my robes. His fingers were not soft but hard and probing. But they had expertise, I had no doubt. He knew just how to work through the furrows. My skin shrank. I hid my face. In hiding I came upon the smell of him, his chest, his kimono. I liked that part. I just didn’t like him touching my private places to try to make something happen. I didn’t want him to know how I worked.

But he continued on. I did not live up to normal performance standards. There was my reluctance to be known. There were some shocking parts that hurt. But somehow we got through.

And then I fell asleep, deeply. Sanba woke me from it and walked me home. I carried my square of cloth with Danjuro’s face print on it. At home I slid open the screen and the cold air entered the room.

Hokusai was still working. He did not look up. “You are home smelling of tobacco,” he said declaratively. “And relatively safe, I suppose.”

“Relatively,” I said.

We both lay down until morning.

T
HERE WAS NEWS IN THE YOSHIWARA
. So Mitsu told me when we dropped in to her shop. It concerned the courtesan Shino. The blind man had written a letter to the owner of the canalside brothel saying he would buy out Shino’s contract. I acted as if I didn’t know. “But that’s not all! Oh
no,
that’s only the start of so many complications!” That owner had asked for a certain sum to pay her debts. Then Jimi, her original owner, stepped in.

Mitsu laid her hand along her jaw as if she had a toothache. She grasped her countertop with one hand; the magnitude of the announcement might blow her off her feet.

“What complications?”

“Kana and Jimi say they still own her.”

“Jimi doesn’t. He sold her,” I said idly. I peered inside the display case wanting to see the seahorses, whose grace and fragility I loved. I wondered if I looked different since I’d been with a man, and if Mitsu would notice.

“He claims that he didn’t, that he was just punishing her, that he was about to take her back. He claims that she has debts with him too. He says he was acting in anger and the sale is not legal. He says the Corner Tamaya still owns her.”

“Then why don’t they take her back?”

I watched my father’s face to see if he flushed or showed guilt. He did not.

“It seemed it would all fall through. And here with a man willing and ready! A shame, izn it?” But, no surprise, money will solve it, the blind man will pay. He’s panting for her.”

It was rather graphic even for Mitsu, and I was rewarded with a slight flinch by Hokusai.

Mitsu moved out into the light of the street. I followed. “Jimi and Kana are insisting that they always loved her, that she was like a daughter to them. This is all for the benefit of the blind man, who can be milked for more and more money.”

She finally looked at me. She was alerted to a change. “Something’s different,” she muttered.

Hokusai’s lip curled. “How long will this take? She will not be beautiful forever.”

I laughed in his face. “The masseur is blind, Old Man. Does he know that she’s beautiful?”

“He knows,” said Mitsu. “His eyes have not, but his hands have seen her.”

Why did we say these words? They were hurtful to everyone. We were silent and moved apart. Mitsu developed a furrow between her eyes. Then she clapped her hands, like a babysitter calling the children.