The Ghost Brush (112 page)

The new regime rapidly clamped down on whatever was left of our life. Which was nothing. Hokusai was making a book that would not be printed. The private commissions for my painted scrolls came no more. I happened to visit the studio of a potter. I had an idea when I saw that the smallest drops of clay from his fingers lay on his floor. I asked permission to collect them. I brought the clay home—enough to fill the palms of my two hands. From it I made a set of tiny ceramic dolls, forming the procession of the freed prisoners. I painted the dolls in bright, unrealistic colours.

“Make something happier,” grumbled Hokusai.

“What could be happier than escaping death?” I said. But I then made models of the Niwaka Festival dancer procession and the Korean ambassadors on their visit to Edo. Each figure had an elaborate ritual costume. I worked the clay with my thumb and forefinger. Each figure no bigger than a thimble. Then I painted them exactly as they were. These figures kept me busy all day, and I found the work absorbing. It was a way of recording our times. I was not, like Sadanobu, afraid of history. I believed it would vindicate us.

I got a carpenter to make me a little wooden box to keep the figures in. Strangely, these dolls were a big success. We sold as many as I could produce, and although the male artists scoffed a little, I could see they would have loved to be earning as we were.

The next year, terrible news: another writer was investigated. This time it was Tanehiko Ryutei, the samurai novelist whose satire, The Rustic Genji, had been published in instalments for over ten years. I suppose the bakufu wanted to know how it ended before they called up the author on the White Sands.

After his investigation, Tanehiko committed suicide.

We were frightened. Tanehiko’s work, like ours, was in the cache that von Siebold had bought and packed for export. They had gone out of Japan and into the wide world. It was a mixed blessing: we were known to outsiders but suspected of treason within. It had been quiet for more than a decade. But perhaps in the new regime, our transgressions would be dug up again. Worn down, we anticipated disaster.

B
ECAUSE MY FATHER WAS BLESSED
with such age, I rarely thought of my own years adding up. To observe that his declining years were occupying the best of mine would have been disloyal. He was afflicted more now by the palsy that had come to him years ago, and which he thought he had conquered. But he was an improbable eighty-two, and though I was a child of his advanced age, I was now a startling forty-two.

I noticed changes, although he tried to hide them from me. His hand shook. He had to concentrate with a fury to keep the shakes from blurring his line. He had a new recipe for long life: dragon-eye evergreen fruit, white sugar, and a gallon of strong potato whiskey, shochu, left standing in a sealed jug for sixty days. He took two cups morning and evening, without fail.

He spent the time in between praying for long life and relief from the bullying of Monster Boy. He began to paint lions he called demon-quellers. He returned to the brush technique he had learned from the nobles early in his life, and he completed each sketch in sixty seconds of concentration, without lifting his brush. Sometimes the beast flew through the air. Sometimes it lay low and snarled. Often when he finished one of these sketches, which he called “exorcisms,” he would ball it up and throw it out the door.

Then suddenly Hokusai announced that he was taking to the road again. He was going to walk across Japan to the sea on the other side. He believed he could find work outside Edo. He took his long bo and left.

I was alone. I made my dolls. I did the odd bit of work for a temple. I took to praying at the women’s temple, though I drew the line at sticking pins into cubes of tofu. For months I heard little of him, only that he had walked all the way to the distant mountains of Nagano. There, he had chanced upon the estate of an art patron and samurai called Takai Kozan, and he had been given shelter, and even work.

Then he reappeared. He stayed part of the year and then left again. I was alone.

39

The Eighteen

TODAY A LONG LETTER ARRIVED
. The plea from Hokusai was clear: “Come to me. I need you, Chin-Chin. Kozan has made us a little house by a stream.”

“My father is asking for me,” I told the vendor of the best noodles in our quarter. I sucked in the soba. The next stall had silvery broiled fish on skewers, very salty. Farther along was eggplant smeared with sweet miso paste.

The fish man grunted and gave me two skewers. The vegetable man was not keen to part with anything from his wooden trays, but he did. The sake vendor’s blazing placards and rude spouts tempted me, but I went past. I was heading to the storyteller at Senso-ji temple. I had become friendly with this man. He was grizzled and dishevelled. I sat beside him on his mat.

“My father asks for me in Obuse. He cannot do the work without me. I’m not surprised. He is in his eighty-sixth year. Decent men, respectable men, are dead in their fiftieth.”

“Hmmph. So, so,” hiccuped Yasayuke, waving away his tobacco smoke. That combined with the incense from the burner almost, but not quite, covered the odour of his kimono. It was stiff with earth and sweat. “You are an old woman yourself.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. When you have an old father, you cannot be old; you must be young.”

He accepted my offer of a skewer of fish.

“He wants me to go to him.”

I pulled a thin, rectangular box out of my basket. It was the size of my forearm. I unpacked the tiny figures made of clay, painted with the deep colours anyone could recognize as my own—deep tea, crimson, the orangey red called beni, dark green, and several shades of blue. I stood them in order on the lid of their box. It was a procession of the castle guards. Rounded and armed, they represented flag bearers, officials, samurai, and even the Shogun himself, although no doubt there was a law against it. But he was so small, only the size of the last joint of my little finger. This is what I was reduced to.

“These are the original keshi ningyo dolls! Accept no substitute!” I called out to the passersby.

“No one will buy that one,” said the storyteller. “It’s gruesome. Make a nice marriage procession.”

As I sunk my teeth into one blackened bit of fish and tore it off, a woman came to stare at my dolls.

“How much do they cost?”

“Five mon.”

She looked with longing. The procession was not beautiful, but it was true. I had seen it. She had seen it too—men with placards naming their crimes, guards with wooden staffs, the ruler wide on his sedan chair. I watched her idly as she wavered. Could she afford it? I kept chewing. I made no attempt to persuade her. And she moved on.

I passed the letter over to Yasayuke.

There was more writing after my father’s, by the rice merchant himself, inviting me to share the mountain refuge with my father. I was to travel with the merchant caravan Juhachi-ya, the Eighteen. Kozan had got me a transit visa to pass through the sekisho, the checkpoints on the route. It said I was the daughter of Koyama-san, owner of Juhachi-ya. The final line of the letter was this: a warm travelling cloak would be waiting for me at his shop in Edo.

“He has provided for me, and I am to drop everything to get there.”

“What is there to drop?”

“Everything! The North Star Studio, our commissions, my students, keshi ningyo dolls . . .”

There was something else. I had a new and very young friend. Her name was Tachi, and she was my niece, the daughter of my brother Sakujiro. Sakujiro had gone up in the world as we had gone down. He now worked in the counting houses of the Shogun. His wife disapproved of me, but the little girl came to visit when she could.

“If you are robbed and killed,” my friend said, his misbehaving eye smiling, “I will tell the story. You will enter legend this way.” The storyteller had been all around Japan. That was one reason he was so popular. He could describe the wild valleys and the splashing waterfalls, and he could whistle like the birds that hid in the tops of ancient cedars.

I laughed with him. “I have already entered legend. I am the devoted daughter of the Old Man Mad about Painting. I am Iitsu, the secret brush. I am ‘She who paints but does not sew.’ And now I am to be disguised as a merchant’s daughter.”

“You’ll talk like this.” He put on his female voice; he drew a cloak over his head, pulled in his chin. He simpered in high tones. “I must travel from Edo to our home in the mountains because my old father is ill. I am not harmful to anyone.”

Then he jumped to his feet and leered down at me, a bakufu guard at the post station. “Where is your husband?”

Again the cloak transformed his face.

“I have no husband. What man would marry me? I am strange.” He allowed a little drool to escape the side of his mouth and crossed his eyes.

He puffed himself up. “The woman is simple. Let her pass.”

But it was just a game. I knew how to speak like a merchant’s daughter: I taught such women every day. I was not afraid. But I resolved to ask my brother if I could take Tachi with me. She could speak for me. I knew the girl was curious about the outside world. He would say yes, not because he wanted to please me or even her, but because he was a snob, and we would be visiting a respectable samurai family, a rich man.

I
PULLED TAKAI KOZAN’S LETTER
out of my kimono. The head carter read it, looked me over, and gave one short, sharp nod. Kozan was the boss, and this was the cargo he wanted.

He cast a scant look at little Tachi, wrapped and still beside me.

“My daughter,” I said.

The oxen were bellowing and thick-skinned and black with road dirt. The men who drove them were no different. One of them lifted me and plopped me in the cart. I would ride with the brass temple bell and the bales of silk and the farm implements. Tachi was lifted beside me. She sat on a pile of books and prints with a wrapper from Ichibee, the rangaku bookseller.

My plain indigo kimono was hidden under a thick cloak. My head was wrapped in the scarf Kozan supplied. We approached the checkpoint. When I was a child I passed here disguised as a boy; now I passed as a samurai woman.

We travelled beside the coast. I gazed at the waves, remembering my father jumping in the foam. I told stories to Tachi. At night we came to a post station and pulled up at an inn. We two went off to a room of our own, our bodies cramped and sore.

We began to follow a river upstream. Fuji, the Peerless Cone, was on my left hand. Then it was gone and the black, jagged rows of rock stood up, sawtoothed and vehement. Through the gaps we saw white peaks. The men sang oxen songs. I learned to arrange the bales so my bones remained intact despite the jogging.

This was the world beyond Edo. This was what the people longed to see.

Even now, in late March, there were patches of snow. The sky was beru, and the wind was a melody from the samisen of a sad courtesan. Down and up the old trail went, full of stones that had been turned by hooves. We came to Magome, a staging town. Shops stuttered up beside the steep road, selling straw sandals and wooden kitchen tools. I bought a pair of sandals. At a bookshop I saw a fake Hokusai print with thick lines, bad colour, and blocks that were not aligned. Years before, we had an apprentice we called Dog Hokusai. Apparently he was still at work: his forgeries sold in the country, while my father and I could not get work in Edo.

We passed a wheel with a thick tongue of water turning it. The men pointed: “Snow is melting on the mountaintops.” We stopped to eat tofu broiled in brown sugar and noodle soup with mountain vegetables. Houseboys from the inns offered prostitutes. Juhachi-ya didn’t stop. Priests and pilgrims gathered at crossroads. The Eighteen shouted for them to make way for our wide and implacable beasts.

After this town we would come to the steepest part, the pass.

“Strange Daughter,” the carters called, “you can get down from the cart now.”

Tachi jumped down too. The sandals were good and my feet flattened out to meet the stones. The men sang and we marked time by hitting the side of the cart. Bearers passed, going the other way. Far away, farmers worked in their fields, which were narrow, snake-like, between ridges. A sashiba, a grey eagle, flapped in a tree above my head. It chased a smaller bird and seized it. Up and up and up.

My chest began to heave.

“Nearly at the top,” one of the men grunted.

We sat on a stone bench, four men and Ei and a child. A waitress came out of a tiny hut to serve us tea. It was familiar to me, and then I knew. My father had drawn this scene: the delicate waitress, the teashop verandah perched over the edge of the steep cliff, the blue hills far off and green ones nearby, and the road beaten flat as a silk ribbon heading through the trees. He had come before us. We were in his footsteps.

Now the path curved along the edge of a hill. Beside us was empty space.

“Ooooh!” Tachi and I held on to each other.

There was a wall of trees growing far down the hill on one side; the sun pushed through the high branches and scattered rays at our feet. The curve was long and spectacular; I felt as if I were walking around the balcony of a giant theatre. The treetops swayed like heads in a crowd of thousands. Plumes of bamboo leaned and sighed in the wind. What was to come? What was to come? The path sloped a little and then a little more. My sandals slapped and slapped harder as my weight pushed me downhill.