The Ghost Brush (132 page)

I wondered, for the first time, if I would have as long a life as my father. I had not imagined that I might be cut short; I’d intended to be rewarded with thirty years of freedom, or forty, after his death. I was strong and as agile as he had been, and could renew myself when thwarted: I had done it forever.

But that was before. Although the years of my father’s life had been dangerous, their cycles of crackdowns and famines were predictable. Now I faced an unknown world. A telegraph in Yokohama sent messages along the Tokaido by wires. Also in that port city, sumo wrestlers moved in a constant belt, carrying huge sacks of rice and silk up the ramps of foreign ships. Peasant farmers sold silk to foreigners and became wealthy if they survived their neighbouring clans’ impulse to murder them as traitors.

And now the catfish, on top of it all.

Sheltering under the tree with us was a diviner, that figure from old pictures, with his long pole with paper fortunes tied on it. He reached out. “Oei,” he said, “you will not have the auspicious life your father had. You will have only a dozen years from the time of the arrival of the barbarians—and that is all.”

The next day dawn came without light. The smoke of thousands of fires curdled the sun. At noon there were more movements of the catfish under Edo, and the news of thousands of dead, all along the river as it ran down to Edo Bay.

I
WAS SITTING ON THE STEP
outside my crumpled dwelling, stroking the cats and watching the babies play in the rubble, when Sakujiro appeared.

“Ah, Sakujiro. How does it go with you?”

I was genuinely happy to see him. I had heard nothing since I had left his home. The earthquake was two weeks ago. I was worried about Tachi. “Is everyone well?”

He told me his wife and family were well but his house was badly damaged. His garden bench had broken in two pieces, just where I had sat on it. No doubt the wife saw meaning in that.

“First the cholera kills so many,” he said, “then the earthquake. There are seven thousand dead. All the carpenters are building coffins. It will be a long time before we can rebuild.”

“I am sorry,” I said. I truly was. But the satirical mood was too strong to resist. “But I am sure the deaths from sickness and disaster were not intended as a personal inconvenience to you.”

Sakujiro curled his lip.

“In the tenements we can rebuild by ourselves. But your magnificent structures cost a great deal more to replace, and you have to pay the poor to do the labour. Your accounts must tell you that.”

He shook his finger in my face. “You speak without caution. Your words are like acid!”

But their truthfulness shot me full of energy. My words gave me back just a little of that which had been denied me. I know I should have dissembled. Could he understand why I spoke as I did? I did not even try to explain. Perhaps I should have. Instead I held out my arms to him. “Do you dislike your sister, or only disapprove of her?” I said.

“I disapprove of artists who disrespect our regime!”

“It was your father’s way,” I snapped. “He would have disapproved of you for being too respectable!”

“That is a filthy lie! My father was not political. He knew how to stay alive, even if you don’t.”

“And who, then, should speak for the afflicted ones?”

“Why, no one, of course.” He stared at me. “The Shogun is their father. He speaks for them. Or are you one of those who favour the return of the Emperor?”

He walked around me, turned his back, and walked away, crossing the narrow back street. Then he turned back towards me and narrowed his eyes, as if removing my surroundings from the picture helped him see me. I was shocked at the next words.

“You are bitter,” he announced, “because we have money and you do not.”

We had been making progress as friends. I didn’t want to fight. I tried to mollify him.

“Let us be agreed. Money is not the cause of this dispute,” I said. “There is cause to celebrate. The earthquakes are over. They were terrible, but they signalled the change our father waited for his entire life. I don’t normally believe in signs, but to peasants like Hokusai—”

This incensed Sakujiro. “Peasant! His mother was a descendant of Lord Kira.”

I pointed to the door sign still hanging on the collapsed beam. “A peasant of Honjo,” it said.

His face turned red. “Hokusai was not above laying claim to his noble ancestry either, when it suited him. You are the peasant, you . . .”

I rocked back on my stoop and blew the tobacco smoke out of the side of my mouth. If I was to be an old hag in an alley, then I would play the part.

He went on. “You say you have no money, but I wonder. Everyone knows that Hokusai commanded enormous sums for his work.”

“Oh, that old story! I am surprised that the son of Hokusai cannot be more original.”

I reached for Sakujiro as if to embrace him, though I would never. “I wish my father had been more prudent with his cash, but as you know yourself, it was not possible to teach him good habits. Please, Brother, may I give you some tea? Let me call the boy—”

But Sakujiro was too far gone in his anger to respond.

“And why don’t you make tea like any normal woman?”

I was stung.

“Why must we fight about our father?” I knew the answer. It was not who he was, but whom he loved. “Brother,” I said, “you came first for him. You were the son. He was not able to show it. But that is how he felt.” It was a lie, but an easy one.

Sakujiro drew breath. “I have not come to fight with you. I have come once again to warn you. You must leave this place. It is dangerous. You are old.”

What was this word they bludgeoned me with? “Old”? Old was not me, not yet, not by twenty years. I was not even sixty. At sixty my father had worn red and called himself “one again,” Iitsu. At sixty he had his best work yet to come.

“This is a safe place,” I protested. “Alcock”—I said the English word slowly and carefully and watched to see that it impressed him—“the British ambassador walks out from his house and around the market, buying pictures and toys. I sold him a set of keshi ningyo dolls . . . And you are wrong that I am old. I rise every morning and chant. I am quick and ready. I am less old today than I was when Hokusai died,” I said.

“This place,” he said very slowly, “has fallen down around your feet. There has been disaster after disaster. And you are without defence.”

It angered me greatly to hear him say it. But this time I dissembled.

“Of course I must listen to you, as the oldest male,” I murmured. “But I don’t understand. If I do not stay here, where will I go?”

“You know where. To Uraga.”

“We tried that already.”

He looked miserable. “I cannot leave you here. My conscience will not allow it.”

“And you cannot take me with you. Your wife will not allow it.”

Finally there was a tiny smile on his face.

And I saw that he did love me, my brother. He loved me as duty would have him love me, although he hated me for what I was.

“Give up your feeble-minded revolutionary glee at this misfortune! It is not a sign! There are no signs. There are no portents. There is no grand story where the downtrodden city-dwellers come out the victors. Our time is a string of accidents, and only the Shogun can protect us.”

He spoke as if he alone knew what was to come.

“There will be accidents, disease, and corruption. There will be chaos. Do not be buried in it. If the next cholera epidemic doesn’t kill you, the censors will root you out. Or the anti-foreigner forces will find you.”

“I want to live as long as Hokusai. A diviner told me that I had at least twelve years of life left.” Suddenly it seemed like quite a few.

He struck his forehead with the heel of his hand. “Stubborn, stubborn, primitive. It’s true our father lived a long time. But these are terrible times. And how did Hokusai survive anyway? Everyone knows. He had you to look after him.”

Tears came to my eyes. No one before, other than Shino, had acknowledged that my care of Hokusai had propelled him to his great age, that this “miracle” had been made at least in part because of my labour. Why, then, should I have only one dozen years more? Unfair! Unfair!

Sakujiro too was shaking with emotion. He touched my hand.

“The world is topsy-turvy. The world is going mad. Uraga was a refuge for our father. It can be one for you,” he said.

I
went to the temple and prayed. Was Sakujiro right? Must I leave Edo? What did the deities think? Was Sakujiro simply jealous of my freedom? No, at heart he was decent. I knew that my brother was right: I could not stay any longer in the tenement.

I had the idea, kneeling there, that I could please him and myself too. I remembered Katsushika Isai’s offer. The disciples were gathering in Yokohama. His shop was selling prints to foreigners, and not only that, the newspapers so favoured by foreigners needed pictures. Should I try Yokohama, heart of the foreign invasion? The heart of the new export enterprise of the Hokusai disciples?

Then a strange thing happened. As I was backing away from the little shrine, a nun approached. I would have passed her by, but she stopped me.

“You are Katsushika Oei, the painter of birds and flowers and cats?”

I could see that she referred to my peaceful respite in the old temple in the hills above Kyoto.

“I am.” I bowed and we both raised our heads to look in each other’s eyes. I recognized her then as one of the nuns who had practised her devotions in that place. I grasped her hands. Tears welled in my eyes at the memory of that time of retreat.

“Did you know that our little old temple by the monkey tree was broken up?” she said. “We have all been moved to different cities.”

I had comforted myself with the idea of Shino there. I was startled, and heavy-hearted.

“Where has Shino been sent, then?”

The nun gripped my hands tighter, lifted and lowered them in happiness. “But of course you haven’t heard.”

I hadn’t. If anyone had wished to reach me, they couldn’t; since my father’s death I had moved from place to place and left no traces.

“I pray it is not bad news.”

“Oh, no. Something wonderful. It seems”—here the nun pulled us closer together (even nuns are prone to gossip, but when they do they try their utmost to disguise the fact)—“it seems she is the daughter of an exalted family.”

“Ah.” I knew that.

“The imperial women came to find her. She has been made the abbess at the Temple of Refuge.”

I stammered my thanks and left the temple quickly. I was in a rush to be gone. I sat a long time by the bridgeposts with Yasayuke. I thought of the diviner’s words, a prediction that meant I had only a handful of years left. It had been weeks since the earthquake, and how as we watched the guards had removed the barrier.

It was another sign. It was time to leave Edo.

58

Japan Overload

REBECCA CHECKED OUT OF HER HOTEL
, abandoned the small Don Kihote special and reclaimed her large and tipsy rolling suitcase. Heaping it with blue knapsack, laptop, and shopping bags, she got a cab to Tokyo Station. The large baggage storage department was lost behind a construction fence. But she found it. She deposited everything but the laptop for the day.

That done, she began moving up the stairs and past barriers and along queues, dodging people. She reached the vast central plain of the main station, where a great mass was moving towards her. It was a sea: individual heads bobbed atop a soup of arms, trunks, and legs, driven forward by invisible force.

She was trying to go against the flow in the morning rush hour. Fatal. She stopped. She attempted to slalom through. No way. Tried to find an opening. She crossed one, two, three people. They kept coming at her. “Have mercy,” she said. But no one could stop even if they wanted to.

She wedged her way onto an escalator and passed a guard, pointing at her ticket. Which track?

“Fourteen,” he said, in perfect English.

Beside the track she examined the row of names and numbers painted on the platform floor. You had to know the name of your train, the number of cars in that particular train, and where on the platform your car would draw up for the precise three seconds available for boarding. She’d become reasonably adept at doing this, so she found her spot (there was a lineup already) and stood there.

The train was packed with people even though it was going out of town in rush hour. Kubota-san had been quite insistent that she go to visit the Isago no Sato Museum in Kawasaki. The museum was devoted to ukiyo-e and, particularly, to scenes of the nearby area; it was the third stop on the Tokaido Line, on the way to Yokohama. He had told the curator to expect her. She would be met at the station exit by a person named Keiko.

But of course there were two exits.

She chose the exit that looked as if it led to a bigger street. Keiko wrote that she would be wearing a red jacket. Rebecca had never realized before how many women in Japan wore red jackets. She saw three, four, six of them. But they weren’t Keiko. Keiko would have a folder about Hokusai in her hand.