The Ghost Brush (133 page)

A woman, red jacket, something in her hand all rolled up so Rebecca couldn’t see it, was coming up the long two-storey escalator as she was going down. Did she look as if she was meeting someone—someone who otherwise might be lost?

Yes.

They passed each other. Irrevocably: it’s in the nature of escalators. Rebecca went all the way to the bottom. Red Jacket went all the way to the top. She did not look back. From the bottom Rebecca looked up between the rising and the descending streams. Red Jacket had disappeared. Rebecca went up again. In the centre of the huge space, now emptying of people, she saw her—a young woman in red watching the passengers coming out.

“Are you Keiko?”

They walked quickly along beside buildings that were jammed together without breathing space. They crossed and re-crossed small, winding tributaries to the main road. Keiko was right: Rebecca could never have found the gallery.

T
HERE, LIKE A GREY TOMBSTONE
in the wet flow of pedestrians, was one of the familiar grey milestones with the
kanji
that marked it the old Tokaido Road. In my time this was a wide boulevard lined with cryptomeria trees. But all that was left of the great highway’s rural nature was a gentle curve. A gentle curve that was, nonetheless, reminiscent, a precious hint of previous, non-grid life. A little window on the old. Tiny narrow buildings, four and five storeys high, appeared, crowding pavement.

The gallery door was only about four feet high: this too marked its age. I drifted into the two small rooms. The walls were covered with ukiyo-e in the gaudy colours of Meiji, showing scenes of Yokohama, Uraga, and the Tokaido—this area,
150
years ago. It was a feast of colour and detail: swaying bodies, sensuous mountainsides with puffy trees. I loved it.

Mrs. Saito came out to apologize. Saito-san, the gallery owner, was not present. “Saito-san’s friend died, so he has gone to visit him.”

“I hope not.” Rebecca smiled.

But it was a bad joke, a grammatical joke dependent on familiarity with English. Of course they didn’t get it. They probably thought she was mad, smiling about the death.

But they were good-natured and giggled back.

The curator of the gallery was a young woman called Ms. Koike Makiko. They were joined by a man: Mr. Ichikawa Shinya, curator of the Hiroshige Museum in Nakagawa-machi. They said: “Kubota-san is the number one person in Japan obsessed with Hokusai; Ichikawa-san is number two.”

Rebecca was delighted. Bow, bow. People started talking. Here’s what she understood:

Oei was now very famous amongst painting students because her technique was so exceptional. She had left very few paintings. However, most scholars see all that work by Hokusai and know he did not do it himself.

“Did she come to this area?” Rebecca asked.

At first they said no. Then they talked amongst themselves. She strained, as if by listening hard she could make the words give up their meaning.

Then she got this: “Some people say she and Hokusai lived at Yokosuka.” That was a small town in the area.

“Before her father died? What about after?”

More talk. A great deal more talk.

“Keiko,” Rebecca pleaded, “what are they saying?”

“Just a minute, please.”

They talked for ten minutes in Japanese.

“Some people say that . . . Some people say that she lived at Totsuka.”

The Inn at Totsuka.

“Was she painting there?”

The curator had a sudden idea. She ran out and returned with her laptop. She navigated her files and opened an image, a wide triptych of black ships. Porters were struggling up a ramp, their backs bent over with Japanese goods—sake barrels, fabrics, statues. She put out her index finger and drew it along, up the ramp.

She said, “Maybe for export.”

“Yes,” Rebecca said. “Yes.”

Rebecca drew her own finger up the ship’s ramp on the image on the laptop screen. “Maybe Oei went on the ship too? Along with her paintings?”

“Mmmmm. No.”

She didn’t expect them to agree; it was a long shot. Really more of a wish than a serious suggestion. A wish that Oei had ended up smoking her pipe in Chinatown, San Francisco, or maybe in Paris, surrounded by admirers.

“Does the museum have any works by Oei?”

The curator went back to her keyboard. An image blossomed on the screen. It was a beautiful, delicate thing.

“Oei-san,” she said, pointing. It was called Bellflower and Taro. An odd combination. Maybe it was Oei’s sense of humour. The bellflower bloomed in early autumn. It had delicate colouring and looked like a morning glory. The painting was exotically beautiful. It had the seal of eighty-eight and Hokusai’s signature.

“I would really like to know what happened to her,” Rebecca said, almost to herself.

“I too,” said the curator fervently.

“Oei-san.” They spoke about her as if she were someone they knew, a neighbour, an ancestor who had often been spoken of. They had suspicions, but they were reluctant to say. They had heard things. More chatter, more conjecture. Then they made up their minds about what to tell the woman from Canada. They spoke hesitant English.

“Some people say . . . that she was killed.”

Rebecca was shocked.

“She was killed? Why? By whom? Do you mean she was murdered?”

A great deal more talk.

“Not murdered.”

“She was very famous, but—”

“Are you saying she was very famous, but her killing was not because of that? It was an accident?”

“No. Not accident,” said the curator.

“She was famous, but the people who killed her didn’t know she was famous,” said Keiko.

More talk. Were they suggesting the death was a random highway mugging that went unnoticed in a chaotic time?

“What are they saying?” Rebecca kept asking Keiko.

“I am not good English-speaker.”

Mrs. Saito then spoke up. “Not a safe area,” she said clearly.

“Was it in a robbery?”

“Yes, maybe. We don’t know. It is a mystery.”

The conversation stalled. Ichikawa-san excused himself. He too was going to the hospital.

“And by the way,” said Keiko into the lurch, “do you like Japanese food? Would you like to come for lunch?”

“Yes, thank you. That would be very kind. I would love to.”

“What would you like? Soba? Sushi?”

“Yes, anything. Well, not really soba. Anything except soba.”

A
t the soba restaurant, the curator and Rebecca had a conversation. It was amazing that they did, with their limited words in common. Makiko had three children. One was born just two months ago. They were at home with her father- and mother-in-law.

“Why are you interested in Oei-san?” she asked. Not even many Japanese knew about her, let alone Canadians.

Rebecca said she really hadn’t had much choice. “I felt as if Oei reached out and grabbed me . . . I think she’s not willing to be a ‘hey you’ in history.”

Another joke they probably didn’t understand.

She added that it still seemed strange that while Oei had painted all her life, there were so few of her works to be found.

“She and Hokusai together . . .” Makiko put her hands in front of her, fingers spread, and pushed them together so her fingers were criss-crossed, all eight of them waving. “They co-operated,” she said.

Rebecca mimed pulling her two hands apart. “Could their work be disentangled?”

I
N TOKYO STATION
Rebecca found her way to Yaesu Exit South, through the construction, up the temporary staircase, and to the baggage room. She reclaimed her large suitcase, shopping bags, and blue knapsack. The timing was tight to get that plane home.

The ticket seller, a category of worker whom in every other case in Japan Rebecca had found to be a model of politeness, informed her curtly with hands crossed in an X that she could not buy a ticket for the
2
:
03
.

“Why?”

“Too late!”

Damn. She bought one for the
2
:
33
. She decided against a coffee and put her ticket into the oh-so-efficient gob of the machine. It shot out the slot and the little padded gates slammed open. She walked for a mile, it seemed—pulling the blue suitcase; humping the blue knapsack, the white shopping bags, the laptop, and the purse; clutching the ticket, which had to be put into the next slot.

She had never been so tired in her life. It had been an endless day already, and she hadn’t even boarded her thirteen-hour flight. She’d just been told Oei had been killed, and she had to leave!

She found her track. Kneeling on the cold marble floor of Track
7
, she turned on her computer. For a few minutes in that hectic place she was the only person in sight. She had to record what she was thinking, so she started to write. The marble was hard. Her knees were cold.

How could a woman work as an artist for an entire lifetime, beginning as early as age ten and continuing over fifty-five years, and leave so little trace—of her work and of her life?

She could not and she did not.

As Makiko said, her work was combined almost inextricably with Hokusai’s. More—perhaps far more—than anyone suspected. But did it have to be inextricable? Couldn’t people tell the difference if they really wanted to? Was it truly a labyrinth, as the experts said, composed of works the master half-completed, works that were copies, and works that were out-and-out forgeries? If so, certain people were getting awfully close to the centre. And others were opposing them: look at the firing of Kubota and the disposal of signed works by Oei, including Mt. Fuji and Bamboo Woods, the picture that had been stored at the Obuse museum but was offered for private sale.

Now, along with negative assumptions, neglect, and tampering with her work, there was something else to add to Oei’s story: a death that was accidental.

Rebecca was engrossed and did not see the time. A vendor came along pushing his cart of tea. He was young. He stopped to look at the woman kneeling in front of her Swiss Army suitcase, laptop perched on top of it.

“Are you going to Narita Airport?”

Rebecca looked up. How odd that he should stop to ask her. He spoke in English. “Yes.”

“Car
10
. Right down at the other end. Farthest car away.”

Her decoding had failed. She gave him a filthy look, then packed up and ran.

S
HE WAS AT HOME
. In her own bed.

Safe and sound. Andrew had flowers and a dinner of chicken with leeks. She fell asleep. In her dreams she was sorting and sifting. She was reminding herself to call Yusuke, to let him know that a woman named Keiko from the gallery in Kawasaki was going to write to him in Japanese, to tell him what they were saying about Oei’s disappearance that she could not understand.

Rebecca—

OK. I will wait for the mail from Keiko.

You must be excited finding an unexpected murder theory. Suddenly the big waves off Kanagawa turned into the mystic sea.

—Yusuke

In a few days he wrote again:

Here is what Ichikawa Shinya and Koike Makiko were saying when you were not getting the translation:

“Oi left Edo saying, ‘I am going to Totsuka, for I was asked to paint a picture for the inn by a man called Bunzo.’ She was never seen again. She might have died in Totsuka, or she might have been attacked by a robber and killed. In that case, the robber would not have recognized that she was a daughter of the famous Hokusai.”

There are some problems with this theory, however: “In those days in the Edo period, people were required to report to the public office when they found a dead body. Otherwise, they were punished. If Oei had been killed and her corpse was witnessed, it would have to have been recorded, but no such a document has been found—yet.”

There is another possibility: “
Ukiyo-e
painters were not highly ranked in the society. Possibly the officers did not put it in the official record.”

They continue: “The reason why the number of works painted by Oei is limited is that she was painting under Hokusai’s name. It is said that Hokusai painted over eighty pictures in several months during his last year. Koike-san thinks it was impossible to finish this many works. So she might have painted these, and Hokusai only put his signature on the works.”