The Ghost Brush (107 page)

—Jack Hillier,
The Art of the Japanese Book

The librarian at the Japan Foundation passed Rebecca an article. “This came for you from headquarters.” That is, Tokyo. She had a funny look on her face. She watched as Rebecca read the title. “A Woman Painter Who Drew Obscene Pictures,” it was called. The librarian covered her mouth with her hand and tittered. It was written by Hayashi Yoshikazu. The title was the only bit that was in English.

She took it straight to Yusuke. He was resigned to his tasks now and took the pages without a murmur. However, he was a very long time getting them back, and when he returned the translated article he said the delay was caused by the copy editor, who refused to read it on moral grounds. But here it was—it took up the topic of a booklet of erotica called Model of a Vagina:

It consists of twelve large-size sheets of canvas with one extra page for the preface and two pages for the supplement. The brush stroke lacks a strong, manly touch. Instead, it looks more like the lyrical brush stroke of a woman . . . But what eventually made me believe that this book was created by Oei was one of the twelve pictures, in which a man and woman were having sex under a
kotatsu
(a foot warmer with a blanket over a low table). There I found a hidden signature that belonged to Oei . . .

There are other questionable works among Hokusai’s erotic books. The famous one is the gigantic octopus and an
ama
having sex, which was in a three-volume book titled
Kinoe no komatsu
, meaning “A Woman in Ecstatic Intercourse.”

Ah, the octopus. The picture that shocked two centuries of erotic experts. Rebecca had seen it before.

She had walked into a tony Asian art gallery in a New York brownstone in the Upper East Eighties and mentioned Hokusai. The dealer idly flashed a magazine cover in her face—octopus and diver entwined, the octopus with its head between her legs, sucking her labia. It gave Rebecca a start at the time, as it was intended to do. Blood rushed to her face. She felt a little sick. She knew she was being mocked. It was like seeing a flasher open his trenchcoat.

The piece was vibrant, in flesh pink and pale green with yellow edging. The lady—a diving ama—reclined across the lower edges of two pages, on the ocean floor. The octopus was definitely an octopus, very fluid with his wide, sat-upon-looking head, pink and hairless, cartoonish, Disney-eyed, with long, waving tentacles. He looked very happy in her nether parts. He had brought along a small sidekick octopus that was up by the diver’s mouth, touching her parted, tiny lips.

Rebecca backed up, murmured something, and got down the stairs pretty quickly. At the time she had thought the dealer was having a dull day. Or maybe he was just trying to separate the sheep from the goats. Real collectors don’t flinch.

When Yusuke sent the image to her in an email, she looked more closely at it. It had soft lines and a kind of glow. The octopus was not hurting the diver but seemed eager to please; she was transported, not frightened, and firmly holding a tentacle. The figures were billowy, as if they floated under water. But it was known as a picture of a woman ravaged, a monstrous rape. It was “harrowing,” Rebecca thought, because the octopus was an animal taking a man’s place.

I
T WAS A WARM, SUNNY NOVEMBER DAY
when Rebecca drove out to see Blair Drawson. He lived in the Beaches, at the very end of a street facing the lake. In front there was a flat, beige sand beach. A couple of dogs were running across it. Kids had beach balls out. It was a summer scene except for the screen of leafless trees between his windows and the lake—faintly unsettling, vaguely surreal.

Blair answered the door instantly on her knock, as if he’d been waiting behind it. He was a man who looked like his work, or his work looked like him: he had wide cheekbones and ears that seemed high and were slightly pointed. His house had some Japanese touches, blue-and-white pottery, a wooden doll, and wooden arches between rooms. His wife had died, leaving him alone in this beautiful place.

“You know these pictures stayed below the radar for a couple of centuries?”

She murmured.

“When the Americans came, official prudism took over. Lots of these pictures were confiscated. No shunga could even be exhibited in Japan until the
1960
s.”

Rebecca asked, “But the artists called them laughing pictures. What did they think they were making? Shameful, pornographic products? Or were they completely normal? Perhaps fantastic and enlightened?”

“These questions don’t have easy answers.”

He brought the chai. They sat and leafed through books of shunga. She felt a bit uncomfortable, the way one does, sitting with a guy in his house looking at pictures of inventive sexual congress. She aimed for detachment, but the magnified bits put her to the test. Could these anatomically correct female genitals be modelled on Oei’s?

“I wonder if I am getting a little too close to my character,” she said shakily.

I
WAS LOOKING OVER HER SHOULDER
.

I knew she would come to them eventually, the pillow pictures. I see the rumours that I, Oei, made them, under my father’s name, have lasted through the century.

What can I do? Plead guilty? Shock and horror would follow. How prudish Rebecca and her pals are! Do they think that people hundreds of years ago lived in a state of innocence? That the Japanese people under the shogunate were children?

Certainly we were tyrannized on the romantic front. Marriage for the higher orders was a matter of licensing for political alliances; for the townspeople it was squalor and many children. Love was expected only in the pleasure quarter. “Feeling” was publicly decried. The official line was “Desire wreaks disorder upon the realm.”

But all Edo was writhing. Daimyo retinues, all male, arrived and stayed for six months. They filled the theatres, the restaurants, and the Yoshiwara. They bought shunga, convenient little volumes of a dozen pictures and a rudimentary story, to give them private consolation. Women too bought them. A thousand high-born ladies were locked up in compounds with absent husbands. What do you think they did to keep busy?

Fathers commissioned volumes for their daughters’ trousseaux—twelve-paged, multi-coloured, lavish illustrated books. Maybe as a manual, or maybe for solace if their husbands were absent. Such a book added value to their dowries.

Our pictures were mostly playful—lovers knocking over tables and jumping maids and being spied upon. Okay, there were a few violent ones. I never liked those much, couldn’t see how people got aroused by them. Did we do it “just for the money”? Of course. We did everything for the money. We had to. But it was fun. Being prohibited, shunga had a certain status. They were political. We were thumbing our noses at the powers above us.

B
lair and Rebecca turned some pages. There were two Hokusai creatures. One had an anatomically correct penis for a head; the other had labia.

Hokusai had studied anatomy in the Dutch books that could be bought in Edo, with their anatomical diagrams. But he must have looked at real bodies too. “Do you think these artists used professional models?” she asked.

No. Blair had looked into it. In the giant spectrum of Edo’s people and their highly specific occupations—noodle seller, charcoal maker, eel catcher, oil seller, and water carrier—there was no job called artist’s model. They kept some chickens and other birds in cages in their studios. Those were their models.

And with people? They used what was at hand.

And what about Oei, his all-around dogsbody, growing up in front of him, turning into a woman—perhaps not so decisively, not voluptuously, not in the approved way of beauty, but inevitably? Blair was convinced he had read that Hokusai used his daughter as a model. He had also read that Utamaro’s model was his sister. But he couldn’t find the references.

“Maybe artists went to the brothels to draw?” There was no concept of privacy: peeping children were behind every screen; musicians played on and maids cleared away the half-eaten food during the sex act. An artist might have sat there too.

“There was plenty to see there, but it cost money.”

Did Hokusai meet a street prostitute and bring her to the studio?

But the studio was home, that one little room where wife and daughters and students ate, worked, and slept.

They kept flipping pages: magnified sexual organs everywhere. “Why are they so big?” Rebecca said, almost pained.

“Because that’s what the audience really wanted to see,” Blair said authoritatively. “That and the contact point between the two. So it was blown up.”

“Could they have made the drawings without models at all?” She was feeling cold and clammy.

Drawson assured her that, absolutely, the figures were often made from memory and imagination. You could see it. That’s why they didn’t always come out right. In some of these pictures, the bodies were in comical, impossible positions. Here was one where a woman’s leg was on backwards. Another where the feet appeared to belong to the wrong legs.

He showed her a shunga commonly assumed to be by Oei: Exhausted Couple with Two Mice and a Cat. A couple making love is mirrored by two little mice beside them on the floor that fail to notice a cat about to pounce.

M
Y FATHER APPEARED ONE NIGHT
.
Atanda, atanda-bate.
I heard him just outside the door. He came in but didn’t greet me. He circled the room, tossing up my cloak where it hung, looking for something.

“So it’s Eisen now, is it?” he said heavily.

How did he know?

“Don’t worry, Old Man. He’s not here,” I said, as Hokusai continued his restless search. I wanted our easy banter. But my father acted like a jealous lover.

He sat down finally and I got him tea. As he took it from my hands I saw that I was forgiven but still to be chastised. “Married, married. He’s married. You don’t learn,” he said.

They said Eisen and I made a strange pair. He was ten years older, a debaucher, a man of the town. I was the gloomy spinster and my father’s drudge. But how we laughed! When we could, we met at the theatre. He wanted to be a playwright. But his work was too full of explanations. I told him that. “There’s nothing to say. The actors just want to strike a spectacular pose, and to have many complications in the action. They don’t need your thoughts!”

I remembered too late that men don’t need my advice. I put my hand over my mouth. It was a gesture all women made to stop their tongues. Was I becoming coy as well?

“But, please, don’t listen to instructions from me,” I said. “My husband wouldn’t.”

“More fool he,” said Eisen, who knew Tomei’s work. “Please continue. I can’t divorce you, because I have not had the pleasure of marrying you. I would beg you to be my wife, but you would refuse me,” he said, gallantly. “I am a dissolute and a poor artist. And anyway”—I had wondered if he would mention it—“I’m married.”

“A minor detail,” I said.

W
ith Eisen, I returned to the teahouses. We drank and shouted and made rude jokes. The courtesans came and went, their soft hands wafting like smoke. The censors were dogging our tracks, making every kind of legitimate picture a crime. The men painted
shunga
for private customers. Eisen said, “Why don’t you do it too? Hokusai used to be one of the best.”

The sake drinkers laughed. “How could she paint them? She is a woman like a man. What she knows about love and sex would only fill a walnut shell.”

I smiled in what I hoped was a mysterious way.

“She has an imagination, doesn’t she?” said Eisen, pushed to defend me.

“That’s more than you could ever expect from any woman.”

I inclined my head to the side, on that sharp angle that could mean anything. But on the way home I was dejected.

It was Eisen who encouraged me. “They think you’re a manly woman? Who better to illustrate a book of laughing pictures? You know both sides.”

T
HE NEXT DAY HE CAME TO GET ME
as soon as night began to fall. We went to the market that had sprung up on the grounds of the Asakusa temple. We sat under a wooden awning at a little restaurant that sold Nara tea. This was tea poured over rice, a proper meal. The sake was not good, but it was cheap. Eisen seemed nervous. The serving girl knelt beside him with another serving of sake.

“Should you wish to undertake the shunga, I believe I can help you with your research,” he said.

It was a proposition. When we rose Eisen rocked back on his heels and reached for my elbow.

“Come,” he said. “We’ll go to my room.”

We hastened, wordlessly, down through the covered stalls, barely nodding to the other artists we passed along the way. What could we say if they asked us where we were going?

“You are so serious,” I said.

He was poking his hearth to get a flame up. His rooms were more elegant than mine. I stood, still wrapped in my cloak, which I had also put over my head and ears.