The Ghost Brush (99 page)

“I suppose your father is responsible,” he mused. “The court painter, able to be his own man.”

He still thought Hokusai was a court painter! I shook my head. “Aren’t the docile women odd? You talk of species. This woman,” I said, nodding at my poor courtesan, “this species is against nature. It must forgo any pleasure of its own. It must serve, and suffer, so the needs of the male are filled. No animal is like this. This is the idea of selfish men. Where do they get the right?”

“Oh, my,” he said. Or something like that. Had he seen my touch on the scroll? He asked no more questions. Of course he had much on his mind. But none of the paintings was signed. Hokusai always signed his work. You would think that even a foreigner would insist. But perhaps he thought we were protecting ourselves from the Shogun’s laws.

W
hen I came next with our last finished works, von Siebold confided that he had arranged to trade with that same Globius, the court astronomer. Globius had a map of the islands to the north. Von Siebold had a map of Edo, as well as a map of the whole nation of Japan.

“This will not be looked upon lightly,” I protested.

“Why? Knowledge must travel!” His eyes lit with fervour. “People want to know. Laws that stifle the curiosity of man are futile laws and cannot last.”

“But you yourself can’t make an end to ‘futile laws,’ as you call them.”

“It’s only a map.”

I had to tell him that pictures and words on paper inspired the rage of the Shogun almost more than anything else. I didn’t understand it myself, but I had learned that it was true. “They are afraid of what is written with the brush. This is why artists are jailed.”

He looked blank.

“They are afraid of years to come,” I said. “They are afraid that eyes from another time will look back and judge them for the way we are. Did you pass the Punishment Grounds? The heads on poles, the flayed corpses on their wooden beams?”

“Yes, we did. Our guards said the display was to make us feel safe.”

“Lucky you didn’t see Hokusai amongst those remains,” I joked.

“You exaggerate.”

“No,” I said as simply and as firmly as I was able. “You have not felt the awful power of Japan pressed down on you.” And in my mind I thought, Not yet you haven’t. I prayed he never did. “We sometimes also think the Shogun is sleeping.”

Von Siebold’s long, deep-set eyes flickered, but he smiled still. He felt he was above suspicion.

As we sat, envoys were discussing the shrinking copper trade. Doctors were gathering to make a presentation about acupuncture. These conversations were not known to anyone. They did not have a material being, so he did not have to keep them in his luggage. He said things into the air. He believed they dissipated like fog, like the spray off the waterfalls.

“I never did meet your father,” said von Siebold, seeking my eyes as if through them he could see into my heart. He took one of my small hands between his two large, white hands. “But perhaps I have met the better part of the painting team.”

My heart warmed. But I chided myself. He was flattering me? Or being flirtatious? “My father has been ill,” I said, “but your beru has cheered him.”

I wondered if I had thanked him enough. My father was improving; maybe the doctor really did work miracles. I walked away. I met two geisha coming in. They were entertainers who would dance and sing and serve them drink. Not courtesans, but a cut above. Still, he would not lack for stimulation.

That was the last time I spoke with him.

H
is much-delayed audience with the Shogun took place. Immediately afterwards, the Tokugawa were finished with the Dutch. They were no longer welcome in Edo. There was a rush to get them out. Von Siebold and his entourage marched out of Edo without the pomp of his entrance, the doctor a full head taller than the rest, with his long, kind face quite absent of expression. I was just a woman at the side of the street in the crowd when I last saw him.

Spring turned to summer. And here I was in the walled-in world. Despite his protestations of love for Japan, von Siebold would go back to his country. I consoled myself that he had my pictures. I pictured his life: he made visits to his wife and child every day; he had his school near the waterfall and the many Japanese doctors who learned the operations that had made him famous. He loved us, but he would be gone. “Our” pictures would go with him.

And now I had a little, high-up window in the walls.

31

The Fish Tank at the End of the Road

IN THE CENTRE OF TORONTO
was a great glass box called the Gardiner Museum. You could see out of every wall. A central staircase with gleaming metal banisters ran up the inside. There were rooms of silver, gold, and porcelain objects. I concluded it was a temple of resurrection, where dead things were worshipped. I floated up past each level, in the way that is the privilege of a ghost.

Rebecca was lunching in the third-floor restaurant with her editor. There was an open kitchen, with men in ponytails and women of a certain age: I now recognized this as the art world. The chef strutted past their table in shoulder-length pageboy hair and a spotless white apron, perfectly trussed. A true celebrity.

The editor ordered something complicated. When it arrived she looked dismayed. It would take all of her concentration to dismantle.

Rebecca broke the news about the novel: it was taking a long time. It had become a kind of forensic search, a hunt through the past for someone who had vanished and now wanted to be found. A great, lost woman artist. Whatever it was, it was very hard to write. Across two centuries. Across the world to a closed country, Japan. In a feudal state.

“I don’t speak the language. I can’t read the writing. I’m a total amateur. And I’ve stumbled into a gang of experts.”

The editor raised her eyebrows as if to say, It has never troubled you before.

“Large groups of experts tend to be male, don’t you think? Men gather information and use it with their impressive, order-loving, detail-rapacious brains. An amateur, and a female one like me, wanders in, magpie-like, collecting all the shiny bits, reading and forgetting facts, making notes out of order.”

“Lack of expertise can be useful,” said the editor. “It means your eyes are open to concepts the experts have long ignored.”

I was hungry. I was always hungry when living—underfed at times, but even if not, just hungry. And I am now the same, in this form. I spotted a paper-wrapped cone of what looked like fried sticks. I plucked it off the serving counter. “Hey!” said one soigné waiter to the other. “That’s mine! Table six is waiting for it!”

The waiters gave each other poisonous looks as I boosted myself onto the counter and picked the chips out of the paper cone. Oh, how it took me back! Potato. Truly delicious. I noticed people dipping the sticks in bowls of creamy stuff so I got some of that too.

“I’m glad you said that. I have to trust my instincts—my inconvenient, unorthodox, not fully realized opinions,” Rebecca said. “Mind you, I absolutely think I’m right.”

Silence while they lunched.

“Besides, I’ve got this long-dead woman artist pushing me on. I told you how they slagged her off as drunk and morose and a bad housekeeper . . .”

The editor didn’t miss a beat. She assumed I was a metaphor. “What’s her art like?”

“Intense. In beautiful, deep colours—red and green and blue. Technically perfect. Finely wrought. You might even say overwrought. Slightly surreal, coming from a dark imagination. It looks . . .” Here Rebecca stared away from her editor, right at me. Rebecca was a bit indirect at times. Especially when she’d been working. It was an effort for her to look someone in the eye, particularly when she felt strongly. She stared through me, and her eyes softened. “She was very talented. Her work is like the art of someone driven, who had nowhere to go but inward.”

“That doesn’t match the image of a slovenly depressive.”

“No, it doesn’t.”

“So where does that reputation come from?” The editor attempted to extract food from her lotus-shaped edible basket. It looked like way too much trouble to me. And there wasn’t much in there. All cage and no bird, as we would say.

“A few biographical accounts of her father. By his disciples, mostly.”

“Well, maybe the disciples were jealous of her. Apple of her father’s eye.”

“I’m not sure she was the apple. More like the drudge. The whole studio benefited from her work. It would have been inconvenient if she became an artist in her own right.”

“Do you know that?”

“I know it, sure. In the way I ‘know’ the rest of the story. Oei is always diminished, but the swipes at her aren’t really even deliberate. It’s insidious. The telescope of art history is pointed at the man beside her. She is just a figure in someone else’s life.”

Rebecca had forgotten her lunch now and was making emphatic hand gestures.

“In the life of her famous father, she’s seen not as herself but as his daughter. Of course, she was. And she did the ‘dutiful daughter’ thing. She did it. But she had a life too. Definitely lacking on the sewing front. The fact that she can paint is barely relevant to the guys who wrote the chronicles of Edo, such as they are. Let’s face it, she got a bad rap from history.”

Rebecca steamed on. I was touched. I sucked each finger and let my lips pop as I pulled it out of my mouth. Great food here. And I liked the analysis. I knew what I thought about how history had treated me. But it was satisfying to hear it said.

“Oh, and one more thing. Everyone depicts her with a dangling head.That droopy angle meant to imply low self-esteem and depression? It didn’t. It was a requirement. She had to appear regretful. She had to prove that despite her defiance, she was still a woman, and apologetic for it too.”

Was that what it was? Perhaps. I slid across the marble counter and retrieved another paper cone.

“Everyone who wrote anything about her was part of the culture and didn’t see through the disguise,” said the editor. She plucked something edible off her plate. “Did any women write about her?”

“Any women? I don’t think so,” said Rebecca thoughtfully. “It was a desperate time for women. No women’s voices have survived. Hardly any.”

“Surely women were literate; they read and they must have been sent to school.”

Rebecca sat back and thought. She told her about the special script that women could read because it didn’t take long to learn. She told her about the yellow-back novels women read.

“They read but didn’t write?”

“Maybe they wrote. But they had such dreadful lives that the things they said were considered subversive and their writing was suppressed.” She gave an example. She had located a few lines penned by a courtesan: the writer lamented her labour, which was endlessly extended by the need to repay her debt. “Tiresome woman,” was the response recorded.

“Somewhere there is a woman’s account,” insisted the editor.

“I would need a Buddhist nun for that.”

“Well, is there one?” Ever practical, these people.

“Oh, sure,” Rebecca said, poking her placemat with her fork. “But they didn’t . . . I wonder if they . . .” She put down her fork and straightened the mat. Actually it was a very good idea to get a Buddhist nun.

A very good idea, I thought.

“Didn’t write? Or didn’t know Oei?” the editor said.

“Didn’t know Oei. Not in reality.”

N
ot in reality.
A ghost can sigh. I did. Reality was a joke with us in Edo. Utamaro painted a Shogun with the name Hisayoshi—and added a note saying that “in reality” Hisayoshi was the historical ruler Hideyoshi, of whom it was forbidden to make a picture.
In reality
signalled that whatever you saw was a transparent fudge. More would be said about Hideyoshi under his false name than ever was under his own name. He sat holding the hand of his male page, with a Korean harlot nearby. It was an accusation that got Utamaro handcuffed and may have caused his death. He had invited it, they said. He had made the disguise see-through.

They all did. Sometimes this meant trouble. The writer and tobacconist Kyoden was interrogated on the White Sands for his “immoral” book. The interrogator accused him of setting it in the licensed quarter. Kyoden insisted that it was based in the distant past. “If that is so,” said the inquisitor, “why do we recognize the fish tank at the end of the road?”

Incidentally revealing that he too knew the forbidden terrain.

The answer was that the fish tank was there to show us what we were really talking about, in reality. We were talking about today, not the past. Our pleasure quarter. And we all were quite familiar with what was at the end of the street.

Full for the moment, I dropped the paper cone and drifted off the counter, looking over these diners up in the rooftops, the women and their curious mixed aspect of freedom and restraint. And the men, with faces set to show how discerning they were, all in black, no colour to be seen. That must be Toronto’s fish tank across the street, a winking glass eruption inside of which, instead of fish, I could see the skeletal remains of enormous lizards, prancing. Positively frightening. And the place was full of children. Shocking.