The Ghost Brush (111 page)

Oei’s signature; her father’s seal.

Rebecca stood two feet from the scroll, snapping pictures.

“It is one of the masterpieces of Meiji period art,” said the curator.

“Why do you suppose it came to Cleveland?”

She looked uncomfortable. “We had a very fine curator here. He must have known about the artist. But he’s been let go,” she said vaguely. “Now I guess no one knows much about her.”

“Does that prove or disprove your theory?” said Andrew.

“Proves it,” she said. “Out of a lifetime of painting, five signed works remained? No, this is the exception that proves the rule.”

The curator put the painting away, showing them where it lived, all rolled up in a long, narrow box on a shelf.

A
S THEY DROVE HOME,
the declining sun was behind them. It set alight the yellow line on the side of the road, the outline of the metal truck ahead, the outlines of the road signs. The lights of the cars coming towards them reflected it as well, great yellow eyes like those of jungle cats. Everything was alive, aloud, gaudy, and gory.

I was smiling from amongst the dead.

38

Apology

I WAS ALONE IN THE NORTH STAR STUDIO
when Matsudaira Sadanobu came to visit. He was old and fat. His retainers filled the doorway and frightened my neighbours. He bowed in humble fashion and asked for my father.

“I never know where the Old Man is. He is on his travels,” I said shortly.

“Your father was beloved by Shogun and commoner alike,” began Sadanobu.

“Ah, but apparently not by those in between,” said I, “the administrators, the councillors, the censors?”

“Yes, by all. We all loved him.”

I took note of the past tense. Did this man know something that I didn’t? I called for the neighbour’s boy to get us tea.

“I am a writer,” said Sadanobu, warming a little. “I understand the difficult life of the artist.”

“Oh, yes. I recall your written works,” I said as we waited. “There was that famous line you wrote in the edict announcing the Kansei Reforms: ‘There have been books since times long past and no more are necessary.’”

He flushed. “That was long ago. Force was needed to save the people. The city had become decadent. History will judge us. I did not want to leave such art as you people created on the record.”

“You were afraid of history.”

“But I understand that my actions created harsh times for writers and artists. I have come to offer my apologies.”

Apologies? We were not ready for them.

“I understand that Hokusai is not well. I myself am near to death. I would like to see him before I die.”

Hokusai was going to die? Was that the rumour?

I retorted: “Hokusai will outlive you. He has already outlived two wives and all my sisters. They died in their twenties, but that is the life of the poor, is it not? He may even outlive me.”

Sadanobu endured my cold words.

“If you seek forgiveness,” I told him, “better to go to your temple. You will not find it here.”

“I want to undo the wrongs I have done in this world before I leave it.”

“Only a man of exceptional arrogance could even imagine that was possible,” I said.

His voice rose alarmingly. “You hold on to the past. That’s not what your Buddha preaches. I loved your father, as I loved the other artists and writers.”

“And that was why you handcuffed us?”

“Yes,” said Sadanobu, “that was why. To prevent harm. You expressed the evil and the corruption within us. We had to stamp it out. But it was not personal.”

“Our hunger was personal. Our hiding was personal. Unfortunately for us, it is all personal. Who is senior councillor now?” I said. “Not Sadanobu. Who is Shogun now? The corrupt Ienari. But who is Hokusai? Hokusai is still Hokusai.”

Beads of sweat formed where the fat man’s hairline would have been had he not shaved it. I saw he did not look well. He may have been near death, But I had no sympathy. My heart was a stone.

“I thought he had changed his name to Iitsu,” he muttered.

“No,” I said, to further confound him, “Iitsu is me.”

D
espite my brave words, the censors were breaking us down. I wondered, sometimes, if the age of the
ukiyo-e
was coming to an end.

Hokusai was writing an introduction to his book One Hundred Views of Mt. Fuji. I smoked my pipe.

“I believe there is nothing of great note in the things I drew before my seventieth birthday,” he said. “In my seventy-third year, I finally apprehended something of the true quality of birds, animals, insects, and fishes, and of the vital nature of grasses and trees.

“I expect that in my eightieth year, I’ll have made some progress. In my ninetieth, I will have penetrated even further into the deeper meaning of things. In my hundredth year I shall have become truly marvellous, and at
110
every dot and every line I make will have a life of its own.”

How he tempted the gods!

The first two volumes of the book were finally published. The third volume was advertised and the blocks cut, but there was no money to print it.

There was another crackdown, an earthquake. And then the rain came. It rained out the crop. The harvest was only one-quarter what it should have been. Summer abandoned us the next year, and the next. The bakufu told us the gods were punishing us for our corruption. The price of rice multiplied three times. Peasants were dying in the countryside; people said bodies were stacked at the sides of the roads, to clear the way for others to walk.

Hungry people do not buy pictures. What hungry people do is borrow from moneylenders.

E
ISEN AND I HAD SPENT THE EVENING
drinking and were walking home through the temple grounds. A storyteller had propped himself up at the foot of a tree and was beckoning all passers to gather in front of him. I seemed to recognize the man. He had thick hair and a stocky body and he could throw his voice.

“Listen to me! I have a story of true events. It has happened in our city. It is a story of the blind moneylender.”

It was pouring rain, as usual. Our umbrellas were drums. The peonies were soapy ruins on the path. I took Eisen’s elbow. “I want to hear this.” The storyteller had hooked me with his eye. He began,

The blind moneylender was a large and canny man with an acute sense of smell. He would have known that the pack of thieves had targeted him that night. He would have heard them following him at a distance, laughing about how they would torture him with knives.

He was a brave man too. And he loved his wife, who had been a courtesan. He had bought out her contract, and the two lived happily together.

The blind man led the thugs away from his home. He went slowly along the Dike of Japan until it narrowed and took a hard right-hand turn. He knew the space by the smell of the lacquer trees and the sound of the carts, the horses, and the feet going by. He stayed near to the sound, knowing that if he was alone, they would attack.

He came to a small bridge over the canal. He became confused. One way was the cooler, moist air towards the edge of town. The other side was better, he thought. So he crossed. But he had forgotten. On that side of the water, there was a theatre. But it had burnt down, leaving an open space.

It was as he crossed this space that they closed in and danced around him with whips. He swayed like a bear, sensing, keeping his balance. He was strong. He caught the first two who jumped him and threw them in the canal. The rest of the thugs laughed to see their chums in trouble. Then they lost patience and caught him with ropes, like a bull, and pulled until his skin rubbed raw.

He shook off these punishments. He seemed to feel no pain. But this maddened his attackers. Someone got a torch and lit the ropes. He could smell the oil and the smoke. He made a run for it and burst the ties, but they threw fire at him, and then the oil. After he was charred black, they pushed him into the water.

Some people said it was the bakufu who did it. He had become too rich.

Eisen hissed in my ear.

But my head was roaring; I could not hear. “What about the moneylender’s wife, who had once been a courtesan?” I shouted.

The storyteller just stared at me. “No more story.” He collected the coins people had thrown on his mat.

I turned to Eisen. He was stricken, not with fear, as I was, but with glee.

“It’s my moneylender, don’t you see?” He began to shout with laughter. He let his umbrella drop and turned around in a circle, looking at the sky, his face washed with rain. “Don’t you see? If he’s gone, he’s taken my debt with him.”

Eisen had built his brothel by borrowing from a moneylender who specialized in brothels. When it burned to the ground and his courtesans fled, he never rebuilt and never repaid, and he feared the moneylender’s thugs. “The man was bald with huge hands; he hung his rosary on his ear,” he said. “Is that the one?”

“That is the one,” I said.

I
SEARCHED FOR SHINO
on the slope behind the Shogun’s castle. Dead only a matter of days, her husband had entered legend. I only had to ask, “Where is the house where the blind moneylender lived?” And the way was pointed out.

Suspicious women opened the screen to me with reluctance. I found my friend kneeling in a room with gold-leaf walls. She saw me but would not speak. I went away and came back the next day, again to be grudgingly admitted. Still she would not speak.

I came back a few days later, and this time an apparition came to slide the screen open. She had shaved her head. She was perfectly bald, as bald as her husband had been. But his head had been a tuber, and hers was a tulip bulb. Her eyes were huge. Her cheekbones jutted. Her pale scalp was blue like the moon.

“Your hair!”

“I only wish my husband had been here to shave it. He’d have done a much better job.” She rubbed the back of her head with its uneven bristles. “You have an eye for detail—please.” She handed me the blade.

As I bent over her nape she whispered that she would be allowed to stay in the marriage house only if she married her husband’s sighted brother. The family and the tax officials were already fighting over the money.

“I have refused,” she said. “No more. I had a husband when I was a child. Then I had a lover, and after that another husband. Surely I can’t be asked to do more for mankind.”

That buried gleam was in her eyes. She might have been grieving him, or she might have been relieved: I could not tell. Whatever it was, it seemed to bring her back to herself.

“Did you love him?”

“You have asked impertinent questions all your life. I’ll answer this much. I was used to my blind man,” she said, “and that, after all, is very much better. He could hear a butterfly land. I liked knowing that he couldn’t see, that he followed me with his ears. I liked him such that I will not have his brother, no matter what the penalty. I am old! I will not submit to marriage again.”

I knew what she would do. The head I was shaving told me. “Taking up with the gods won’t leave you free from the ways of men,” I said.

“I’ve made up my mind,” said Shino.

“Don’t be so quick.” I wanted her to stay with me. We could live together and perhaps tame the Old Man when he came in from the road. “You exchange one captivity for another.”

She gave me a half smile and shook her head. “You are right. We are never free. We exchange cages. But we are released from time to time. Now is such a time.”

“That’s not what I meant!”

She would go to a temple, but only for a short time. She planned to be a pilgrim on the roads.

She took my face in her cool hands for one minute, and then asked me to leave. She had to pack her belongings. Her in-laws would at least let her store them in the house.

And so the blind man who had stolen her first stole her again in death. And then he stole from me yet again. This time he took Eisen. My friend was free of debt. He no longer had to stay in Edo. With his freedom, he committed the unpardonable: he went off with Hiroshige, the young rival, as we still called him, to paint the scenes of his Fifty-three Stages of the Tokaido. He always said he had a penchant for betrayal.

I
N EDO, EVERYONE SPOKE OF THE OLD DAYS
. The censors had won. You could not make a living making prints anymore. The business was finished. At least the best artists in it were finished.

In
1841
the Shogun Ienari died—he of the falcon hunt who had laughed at the chicken with its red dyed feet. He was as dissolute as his councillors thought we were. His death was celebrated. Seven days later, eighty prisoners were let out of the jailhouse; they marched in a parade, toothless, gaunt, clothes half-eaten by rats—that is, unless a family member had sent them something new to wear. It was if they’d been asked to stand up and exit their graves.