The Ghost Brush (123 page)

They set out for her little hotel, which had a French name, the Vent Vert. As they stood awkwardly, discovering how much this language gap really did matter, a translator joined them. His name was Hart and he was from upstate New York.

They walked through the pretty town. They chatted—Hart twice as much as Kubota and Rebecca, because everything she said in English he had to say in Japanese, and then everything Kubota-san said in Japanese Hart had to repeat in English. He made it so seamless they forgot that neither of them understood a word the other said.

Kubota explained that he was no longer working at the Takai Kozan Museum as a researcher. He had been fired.

Rebecca expressed her regret and astonishment. Such an accomplished researcher, publishing in the journals on a regular basis, writing with authority, full of detailed information! Why would he be fired?

He said he thought it was because of his research on Oei. The Hokusai establishment did not appreciate it.

49

The Miso Factory

THE WELL-PRESERVED ESTATE
of Takai Kozan—rice merchant, samurai, and art patron—fit harmoniously into the landscape. The three of them followed the brick paths that wound through private, small gardens. Mounded dry grasses covered the open space between buildings. The tiles were grey-blue on slanted roofs that mimicked the steep angles of the peaks. The old sake factory used its nineteenth-century methods; great oak barrels lay in the sun, drying.

Kubota-san said that Hokusai had not been expected in Obuse. He just “showed up” uninvited in his eighty-second year, having walked from Edo. No one understood why. The reason for his flight might have been poverty, or it might have been politics. Kozan recognized him, took him in, and gave him work. After some time he went back to Edo. Later he returned for a second visit. At that point Hokusai said that his daughter must join him: he could not manage without her.

One of the preserved buildings had been Kozan’s studio. Upstairs, Kubota knelt in front of a three-stringed koto instrument and plucked the strings. Light flowed in through the window, which overlooked the fields and approaching road. Kozan would have had an eye on the country as he sat here playing.

Kubota showed Rebecca secret cabinets and a hidden door that allowed quick escape if someone surprised him here.

Why did he need that?

Politics, was the short answer.

They walked outside and stopped a few feet away.

“Here,” said Kubota-san, “was the house that Kozan built for Hokusai and Oei.” A little gutter ran by: a painter always needed water.

The sun had made it over the rim of mountains and the water winked. All of this was like some bizarre reverse dream: I have imagined this, thought Rebecca, I have dreamed it, and my dreaming of it has led me to this place, which is as I thought it would be, and which is where my story did, in fact, happen.

That feeling strengthened as the day went on.

They visited the Hokusai Museum. The museum was built in
1976
, before the bubble years of the Japanese economy, on the property of the Kozan estate. Upstairs, on the wall, were six of Hokusai’s “demon quelling” sketches. These were his exorcisms: charms to be released from his illness and his grandson’s bullying. Every day he made one of these, then crumpled it and threw it out the door.

They were beautiful—and rough. Instructive too of the work he completed in his last years. Black ink and brush on rice paper, done in a shaking hand. The line was ragged, sometimes thick and sometimes thin. There was a feeling of urgency, of flux; greys and blacks of different depths overlay one another. They were very moving, a bid to push time back.

Then they stopped in front of the pair of paintings called Chrysanthemums.

There they were. Executed with precision and patience, with many overlapping petals drawn with great exactitude. Immensely detailed, brilliant with deep colours, the flowers massed in the centre, a thousand little tongued petals artfully created on the difficult silk. The background was blank, no detail.

Kubota repeated what he’d written in his article, the one Yusuke had translated for her. “Kozan’s records showed that in March
1853
, four years after her father’s death, Oei sent him her work titled The Silk Book: The Illustration of Chrysanthemum. Kozan recorded paying ‘
2
ryo
2
bu,’ far more than he ever paid to Hokusai.”

Hart carefully translated as Kubota-san spoke. The estate had owned the Oei works, according to records, but then they were no longer in its holdings. Strangely, in
1983
, the Hokusai Museum bought the paintings, called Chrysanthemums, also signed by Hokusai, from a dealer in London.

Kubota-san said something was odd about the signature. Usually the seal and signature were placed near the right bottom of the panel, as one looked at it. But in this case, the signature was up higher and on the left. Kubota showed how the bottom of the scroll might have been cut off and the signature put up top.

The signature was nothing at all like the signature on the Exorcism, hanging on the nearby wall.

Rebecca wondered why it said his age was eighty-eight—apart from the fact that that was the year he was in Obuse.

“The number eighty-eight is very easy to forge,” explained Kubota.

A pair of chrysanthemum paintings by Oei had been lost. A pair of chrysanthemum paintings had come back to Obuse from Europe.

Only now they were Hokusai’s work.

R
ebecca stood over a glass display case. She was looking down on two letters in Oei’s hand.

The letters were written to someone in Obuse.

She asked to hear one read. It was a three-way translation: Kubota read the letter, written in pre-modern Japanese, and said the words aloud in contemporary Japanese; Hart then repeated them in English. It was a short note and probably the earlier of the two letters.

Thank you for your letter. Although we have never met, I am most pleased to hear that you are doing well. I am terribly sorry not to have responded to your correspondence of last month, but I have not been at home. At any rate, I will have returned by the middle of next month and intend to provide you with examples at that time. In haste, I write only briefly to relay this message.

P.S. Thank you for the many Obuse chestnuts. I struggle to find words of gratitude and my handwriting is frightful, making this difficult to read, I am sure. Nevertheless, I do hope you will accept my thanks.

It was signed, “Ei at Miura-ya.”

Rebecca was unexpectedly moved. She teared up. She was embarrassed. But the words had caught her off guard. They were gracious. They were charming. They were not like those of the ghost who egged her on, not at all. They were those of a nineteenth-century woman who observed the conventions—at least on the surface. It seemed that Oei was responding to a commission, promising to supply examples in a month. It was ordinary, personal. It was as if she were alive, speaking to them. She was at Miura, the hills above Uraga; she must have been staying with family.

The other letter was longer. Much of it consisted of instructions for making red pigment. “That was her job,” said Kubota-san, surprising her with his English.

Little pictures were interspersed in the characters: of fingertips and bits of seed falling, of a small bowl.

I trust this correspondence finds you well.

Thank you for your generous gift.

I am terribly busy these days and for now am able to send but one example. I am also sending a preliminary sketch for a picture of a Beauty. Next month I will provide you with many examples, but for this month please make do with this . . . Well, then, let me tell you about a paint called
shoenji
. First, remove as much of the oil as possible from your fingertips. Then knead the
shoenji
between your fingers, causing all the red powder to fall. Then you boil it down. If you’ve done like so [illustration of fingers kneading] and ended up with this much [illustration of quarter circle], you should put water in a dish like this [illustration of water in dish] and heat it over a fire. Add the
shoenji
powder to the water and boil the water away until the white at the bottom of the dish shows through. Even at a very low flame it will start to burn at the edge of the dish, so the dish should be rotated.

“Pretty exact cooking directions from a woman who never cooked!” said Rebecca. The recipe went on.

As the water boils away and you remove the dish from the heat, you will find that there is but very little
shoenji
left at the end. Rotate the dish as it heats, as the
shoenji
will scorch and blacken if you increase the heat too quickly. Add to one
go
of
egoma
oil an amount of
shoenji
powder roughly equal to a lead shot [illustration of a circle] and bury it in the earth for
60
days.

Kubota was speaking rapidly to the translator. Hart said, “There is another way of interpreting that last—which is that you use actual lead shot.”

The process is difficult to explain as the letter grows so long; I’m afraid it may be impossible to provide an adequate written explanation. I have done my best, however, in attempting to answer your question.

With best wishes,

Ei at Nakajima-ya

Rebecca was stunned. Bury it in the earth for sixty days! No wonder the paint was strong. Here was the secret Oei had never told, not even to Eisen—would not have told—until now. Why had she revealed it in this letter? There was no date. If the letter was written after Hokusai’s death, which is the assumption, it may have been that she remained in contact with her student in Obuse. She must have completely trusted him.

But maybe she’d held something back. She had said it was impossible to put it all down.

There was a small hole in the paper. Kubota-san thought maybe the recipient had burned it while following the instructions (“Even at a very low flame, it will start to burn . . .”).

Rebecca stood back and marvelled at the little burn hole. Half the size of her little fingertip and yet eloquent at
150
years. A person from Obuse had obviously written Oei to ask for samples of her work. He also asked how to make her trademark paints. She’d written an answer of a sort, complicated and perhaps a little coy (“difficult to explain as the letter grows so long; . . . it may be impossible to provide . . .”), which gave some help but likely not the complete tools to make the paint. The fact that the recipient burned a hole in the paper suggested he had some difficulty with the recipe.

If it was a he. Strangely, there was a small, neat rectangular piece torn out of the paper; the addressee’s name had been removed. Her correspondent—or someone else— had saved Oei’s words but erased his or her own identity.

There was no date on the notes, so it was impossible to know if they were written before Hokusai’s death or after.

She did in fact seem to be moving around, as Kobayashi-sensei had suggested. In the first note Oei was at Miura-ya, near Uraga, the fishing village that became the landing place for the black ships. In the second she seemed to be with the Nakajima family, her brother’s paternal relatives. She was busy doing commissions.

The next thing Kubota-san showed Rebecca was a copy of the receipt, in Hokusai’s hand, that he had discovered in the archives. On it were the two cartoon faces, of Hokusai and Oei. He was in profile. She was looking straight out.

It was the second picture Rebecca had ever seen of Oei. (The first was Tsuyuki Kosho’s much-copied drawing of the droopy sidekick to the great man at work.) This was a cartoon, drawn with affection by her father. She looked straight on; she had wavy hair drawn back from her square hairline and a dot in the middle of her forehead, between her eyes. This must be a Buddhist decoration. And a prominent, lantern-shaped jaw.

“Strong-jawed woman,” Rebecca said.

Kubota-san gave a sort of giggle. “Masculine woman,” was what he said.

The receipt was remarkable. Such a bill for services, with two little portraits on it, was a clear message that father and daughter had done the work together. It was quite literally equal billing.

L
ater that afternoon, Rebecca stood with Kubota-san in the barn, looking at festival funeral floats. Painted in the late
1840
s, these vehicles were perfectly preserved. The ceiling panels were in place. By craning your neck, you could see furious waves circling over the central space. The works were known as “Hokusai’s last masterpieces.”