The Ghost Brush (88 page)

“Never mind! Shino is making history. She’s the only woman in the Yoshiwara who has been sold three times and will be free by her twenty-seventh birthday.”

So Shino would marry. She could dress in plain indigo cotton, woven in stripes, like any townswoman. To our shame, neither my father nor I expressed gladness for her. We walked on with Mitsu still talking.

“Oh, and that’z another thing. The blind man has family! Like worms they’ve crawled out of the woodwork. Just a poor dumb masseur stumbling around the pleasure quarters and he had nobody, but now he’s a moneylender”—she brushed her thumb and forefinger together—“we find out he’s got parents and a brother, all living in the suburbs.” This little cynical snip of life amused her and she started to laugh, and tears wobbled on her cheekbones.

“So where is Shino now?”

Mitsu lifted her shoulders slowly, grandly, and dropped them. She fixed her dark pupils on me. “I don’t know.”

I
went to the canalside brothel at twilight. Shino was not sitting behind her lattice. I was thankful but apprehensive. I asked one of the other women where she’d gone. “Corner Tamaya,” the white-faced shape said out of the side of her mouth where she knelt in the lamplight.

At the Corner Tamaya, Kana opened her arms to me.

“A woman you’ve become, izn it?”

“It is.” I was happy and blushing. “How do you know?”

“I can see it. You have a secret smile.”

I smiled, not secretly.

“You’ve come to see Shino. I know. You are so happy for her. But she is not available.”

“Oh.”

“She’s getting ready. This is her number-one day. Her last parade. Yes, her debt will be paid, you know. She will go out of the pleasure quarter a free woman. We wanted to do this much for her.”

“What is she doing?”

“The hairdresser has come. She is putting on her makeup. Putting on her lovely kimono for the last time.” Kana opened her hands once more to show there was no limit to what the brothel would do for her. “Then she will give it away. She will give away her bedding too, tonight.”

I couldn’t imagine anyone would want it.

The retirement parade was a ritual, although it was rare to see it. “Go on, now. Come back in a few hours and you’ll see her.”

I
stood by the side of the boulevard. They came out of Corner Tamaya at twilight, the courtesans Fumi II and Yuko walking on either side of Shino. She did not stumble on this, her last public march, but smiled faintly, distantly straight ahead and held her chin up. The apprentices came behind carrying boxes of “gifts,” and the “boy” who carried the waste, that pathetic old man, paraded last.

There was a crowd.

“There she is, the yakko. Can you see the scar?”

“She walks beautifully, izn it? There won’t be one like her again.”

“She deserves her freedom. She was kind and good.”

Retirement was a kind of death to a courtesan. A good death: an end to that life of serving men. Her name would die too, I supposed. I wondered what name she would take tomorrow. She would be an ordinary woman, and she would leave the Corner Tamaya as a daughter left her parents’ house, to go to her new husband—that is, after he had handed over the money. Tomorrow there would be no more Shino. Who would she be? I wondered.

My friend looked neither right nor left. Her eyes saw no one: they weren’t supposed to. She looked straight ahead into the future and did the figure-eight step with perfect balance. Each step ended with a little circle kick out the back, which signified her tossing off this world of debauchery.

I meant to go back home, but I couldn’t leave her. I went back to the Corner Tamaya and coaxed Kana to let me inside. Shino was not allowed outside that night, in case she ran. I came in to see her seated in front of her oval mirror while Fumi shaved off her eyebrows. It was the custom for married women. Fumi soaped the arch of soft black hairs that had always informed me ahead of time of Shino’s mood, whether it was dangerous or not. Then she pulled them out, one by one.

“You’ll have a wide forehead, to be in the wide world,” said Yuko. The women tittered.

“Your hair will be down and you will wear the blue stripes of the townswoman.”

All these good wishes! Hanging over the screen were a wedding kimono of white silk and a dress for after the ceremony, made of red silk. The blind man had given the fabric. His family waited for her. They had come to dinner to meet her the night before, and she had charmed them with her koto and her dance. She had spoken to them of poetry and religion, just as she ought.

“You shuddv heard her: she wz fabulous. We listened behind the screen,” said one of the apprentices. “The way she talks ’z music!”

The last part of the ritual took place in the kitchen. The maids brought a large bowl of water. The Yoshiwara was marshy land, originally. Before leaving it, a retiring courtesan washed its mud off her feet. Shino’s feet were narrow and arched, unblemished. They would be clean when she started her new life.

She sat on a stool and put one foot in the bowl, wincing from the cold. We each took a turn, soaping one foot and then the other. Yuko tried to remove the bowl; a fresh bowl of rinse water was on the way. She slipped and nearly fell, catching herself on another girl’s shoulder. That girl pushed back. Shino dipped her toe down and sent a perfectly aimed spray at Kana’s face. I put my hand in the bowl and swept out a great wave.

“Aeeii, you little shit! I’m soaked!” Fumi got control of the bowl, dumping half of it on me. “Let’s wash off those sins!”

“You’re terrible! More water!” Everyone was splashing and sliding across the wooden floor and laughing.

I got no chance to ask Shino what her mother-in-law was like. I heard that her dowry belongings had been carried to the in-laws’ house already: her box of shells, her white face paint, her black brush and tweezers, even her long pole with the blade on the end, the naginata, reclaimed after these years from Shirobei, the guard at the gate. Now they had everything but her. I hoped it was true what they all said, that the family would accept her as the daughter they needed. After all, the son they had to offer was damaged goods as well, wasn’t he? I begged Kana to let me sleep over. My father would think I was with Sanba. But I wanted to stay at the brothel as I had when I was a child, one more time.

And I did: we lay on her mattress.

“What name will you take?” I said. “What was your name before?”

“I will not retire my name. I have discussed it with my husband. The young wife who was sent here is dead. But Shino is not. We have enough name changes in our lives, don’t you think?”

In the morning we rose late. Her new white feet she put into socks. Socks! Allowed for the first time in nearly ten years! Her feet had always been cold. We wrapped her in the new kimono. She grasped me by the shoulders as soon as she saw me and asked me to carry her bedding to the women on the canalside. “They need it,” she said.

The ceremony was nearly the same as a funeral. Jimi and Kana had lit torches at either side of the door, to signal the departure of a dead body. The blind man and his brothers came to the front door with a palanquin. Kana tossed rice grains in the little carrying box to purify it. Then Shino stepped inside, and the porters lifted it for her journey back across the Bridge of Hesitation. I saw no more of her.

I missed her terribly for almost a full year. But when the date of her marriage came around again, I stopped hating her and began to understand what it is to stay alive. We ourselves were working from dawn until the light fell. I thought I might one day see her at Nihonbashi or near the theatres, her hair tied and hanging down her back, loosed from its artificial courtesan’s mound. It was one reason I loved to do the outside errands. But Edo was so enormous. I supposed there was little hope of our meeting by chance.

23

The Painting Competition

ON CERTAIN OCCASIONS
Sanba dropped by the studio, diffident in his plain black kimono. Could I come to the theatre?

Once, after we had made our plans, Hokusai looked over and said, “You think you are pulling one over on your old man, don’t you?”

“No, I don’t.”

But he didn’t stop me.

In the theatre I entered the melodrama of my times. I watched depraved sons and greedy merchants. I liked the warrior plays, stories set in the long-ago past but understood to represent the politics of Edo. Evil murderers, virtuous wives: I loved the suffering the actors put up onstage. I shouted along with the mob. Sanba called me a true believer.

After, to calm ourselves, we sat and smoked. I critiqued. I’d say an actor was heaven to look at or getting long in the tooth. A writer must live with his head down a mole hole. Or the costumes made my mouth water. “I just like to hear you talk, Strong-jawed Woman,” Sanba would say. I could make him laugh, especially if I drank sake. And if he drank sake, he wanted to take me to bed. I must have pleased him a little, or he wouldn’t have kept asking. I’d creep home before dawn, when the stars were still visible, in the Hour of the Ox. My father would unfailingly be hunched over his work.

The Forty-seven Ronin project never materialized, not with Sanba. My lover was always behind on his deadlines. He liked it that way. When he really needed to produce he took a room over his publisher’s office. And if that didn’t work, he went into hiding. He emerged, sometimes weeks later, with a finished manuscript and a desire to celebrate. He found his home distracting because he had a small son. I didn’t know where he was most of the time.

But I knew he’d reappear. We sat in little bars on barges along the Sumida. We walked along together—slowly, because Sanba suffered from gout that made his feet and ankles hurt. I drank with the crowd of printmakers, writers, and hangers-on—my father’s friends, or they would have been, had he taken time to hang out with them.

I was happy then. I was a known entity: Hokusai’s daughter, Sanba’s lover, an apprentice artist. So what if my ears—like my father’s—were meant for a person twice my size? If I was afflicted with the inability to be compliant? This body gave me pleasure, and Sanba too.

A miracle had happened. Life had opened a place for me.

M
Y FATHER WAS POOR AND PROUD OF IT
. I began to understand why. It was his image, and it helped him become famous.

One day a furnisher for the Shogun came to the North Star Studio. This in itself was astonishing. More astonishing was that Hokusai took a dislike to the man and said he was busy. “I come not to buy a painting,” the messenger told me. “I come with an invitation.” He looked as if he wished he didn’t have to.

Hokusai was not painting, but he was thinking about painting. Sometimes this took a long time. He sat on his mat in full view of the messenger, who was kept kneeling in the doorway. It was early summer. Our clothing was thin, plain cotton. The messenger remained on his knees, in his bright, padded jacket bearing the crest of the Shogun. Eventually Hokusai waved. The man could speak.

“I bring an invitation to join the Shogun Ienari on an afternoon of hunting.”

“Hunting?” my father murmured, very low. “I will show you hunting.” He asked me to bring him his outer robe.

Hokusai clad the subjects of his paintings in sumptuous velvets, but his own outer robe was shabby, had been worn many times, and was never cleaned. I reached it where it hung over the top of the screen, noted its odour, and carried it to my father on outstretched arms. I hoped to demonstrate to the messenger of the Shogun the necessity of showing deference.

Hokusai took the coat on his knees. He stretched out the collar and squinted at it. He made a quick jab, two fingers held like pincers. He gave a grunt of satisfaction. He peered again, running the fabric through his fingers. “Ah!” he said and again jabbed at the garment. “Mmmm!”

He was hunting a louse. I tried to see the messenger’s face, but I couldn’t. He didn’t move; I didn’t move.

He caught a dozen, crushing the barely visible creatures between the tips of his thumb and forefinger with great noises of satisfaction. He seemed to be alone in his world. To interrupt would bring a shower of abuse. The messenger, accustomed to self-abasement at the palace, waited. Hokusai hunted and pecked, hunted and pecked.

Finally he had had enough.

“Hey, you! Ooo-ei,” he said. “Is there a messenger waiting?”

“Yes, Father.”

“Tell him I can see him now.”

T
he invitation was to attend a falcon-hunting party at the tidal gardens. The painter Buncho of the Shirakawa clan would be there, and the Shogun wanted an impromptu painting competition. This was the heart of enemy territory. Sadanobu was fond of Buncho. Suddenly Hokusai was jovial.

“I would be delighted. One request: may I bring my daughter?”

The messenger bowed. “We provide you with as many servants as you need.”

“No, no. No servants. Only my daughter can be trusted with my brushes.”

I
didn’t mind the long walk to the hunting site. It was the live chicken that annoyed me. Hokusai strode resolutely, bowlegged, in front. I came behind with the ink, and the squawking covered cage that bumped against my shins. People averted their eyes, as if I were burping uncontrollably. Behind me the Shogun’s servant carried the roll of paper and a large mop.