The Ghost Brush (17 page)

“We are having our dance lesson,” she said calmly, seeming not to notice that she was being choked. She did not look down. She gazed at Jimi, her black eyes serene. There was that unquenched thing in them again that I’d seen the first time I met her, when Tsutaya insulted her. I suddenly wondered what her real name was, the girl who saw no reason to submit, and who had bought herself this sentence.

“Dance lesson!”

Jimi did not see into the depths of her eyes. He was not a subtle man. But he sniffed something; he got a whiff of it. He was a big fish in the waters of other people’s helplessness, a scaly predator. But for a brief instant, he suspected his power over the girls was a charade. A shadow crossed his face. His eyes scoured Shino. He saw only a yakko. He could not see his prostitutes as capable of anything. If he had imagined they were learning self-defence he would have laughed. He knew something was off balance. But he could not grasp that it was him.

He lifted his right hand and slapped Shino across the face. A sharp tool in his hand, a blade to cut his tobacco, sliced her jaw. There was no blood at first. Then it seeped out the edges of the clean cut and stood.

She swayed. She had no other reaction.

He loosened his hand from her collar.

The blood filled the gash and slowly, minutely, began to overflow. He examined it with mild interest. I knew what he was hoping—that he hadn’t marked her and brought her value down. “You’ve done something to your face,” he murmured.

Shino tidied her kimono and twisted her heavy hair rapidly, pinning it in place. Without his noticing, she edged out of range. Then she touched her cheek.

“I am so sorry. It’s a rather wild dance,” she murmured. “It’s meant to follow the drinking competition. It occurs near the end of an evening, as a prelude. That’s why the hair is loose.” She began to put her pins back.

The others remained on their faces. I was on the floor myself; I didn’t want to see.

He must have thought she got off too easily. “Insolent bitch,” he said, lunging forward to take her elbow and twist it behind her back. But Shino was not there. He lost his balance. She knelt, slipping her knee behind his. He tumbled over her onto his side.

For a minute he lay there. Impossible to say how it had happened.

Shino was kneeling beside his head. “I am so very sorry,” she said, “so clumsy. It is my mistake.”

He might have exploded, beat her, if she showed nerves. But she didn’t. “I only meant to bow to you, but as I moved forward you did too, and we collided. I do apologize. I must have caused you to tumble. Please, let me help you . . .”

She looked at me over his back, and in this moment, when her life could have ended, when her life did, in fact, take a nasty turn, I swear she raised one eyebrow. Then she cocked her head: get out!

I ran. Street urchin with the hair of a boy, no one cared to stop me.

W
e waited all day for news. Mitsu finally came back to the tattoo shop where my father and I waited. She said Shino was lucky.

“She was not hurt.”

“Not hurt?”

“Only a scratch. It will heal in no time.”

“Only Jimi was hurt. Izn it?” I said, to make my father laugh. He didn’t.

“What else? Give us the news.”

But Mitsu was in no hurry. She was not going to give up her moment in the spotlight so easily. She sighed and smoothed her hair, asked for tea; Waki brought it, dainty and concerned. My father wore a look of stone—not allowed pity, not allowed fear.

“She was lucky. Oh, she was lucky. He could have killed her. He may yet have scarred her for life. Unknown how it will come out, that cut. Izn it? As it is, she is only—” Mitsu took a giant breath, stretched her eyes and pushed them out, forced her lips down at the corners, and blew out a big O.

“She is what?” Hokusai stood on one foot and then the other. What he could not show in his face he showed in his calf muscles, his thighs, his arms and fists; they clenched and unclenched. I had been vomiting. It was my fault; I knew it was my fault. I wished she had killed Jimi. I was sure she could have, with those hairpins. But I would never tell.

“She is bruised. Where he beat her. Around her arms and back. Where it will not damage her worth. The others are caring for her. They have sent for herbs and bandages. They have secured a spell: a paper on which is written a list of each of the grand shrines of Ise. She has eaten this, and the bleeding has stopped.”

It seemed very recent and accurate news.

My father paced. He knew something of Western medicine and did not believe in spells. On the other hand, he did not disbelieve them either.

“How do you know this, Mitsu?” Hokusai squinted.

As the boulevard gossip, Mitsu knew everything about everyone. She never had to explain. She looked wounded. Did we not trust her account?

“I have my ways,” she said. “I have been in the district a long time. Longer than you have. Longer than any of you.

“She was teaching the others to dance. To be graceful, you know. Kana, she’s my friend, the yarite. I knew her when she was only a poor-class prostitute. Kana feels guilty. She encouraged her. Shino was only trying to help. But the dance got rather wild. Jimi thought they were plotting somehow. Kana protested Shino’s innocence. She truly did.”

Mitsu looked very important. Very sober. “Kana has saved Shino’s life. She will be punished for insolence only, even though Jimi somehow—inexplicably—hurt his back as he was attempting to stop the commotion.” Mitsu stretched up her terrible eyebrows and pulled down the edges of her mouth. Like a villain in a kabuki poster, she was. She was lavish with the horror of her message.

“All the same he tied her to a post and threatened her with his whip. He punched her. The courtesans were all crying, begging him to stop. Can you imagine? They were only dancing. What possessed the man?”

I knew what had possessed him: that serene and inner defiance in Shino’s eyes. She had stood up to him, and in such an elegant way that it made him feel stupid.

“And what could the man do?” Mitsu could be heard repeating to all and sundry. “His prostitutes all stood up for her. They said they were all at fault, and if he punished her he must punish all of them. And he couldn’t punish them all without going without a week’s income, maybe even ruining his business. I know, because I’m a businesswoman too. He had to listen, especially to Hana-ogi.”

We were unfreezing, my father and I.

“That is all very well, but . . . but . . .” The eyebrows were working, the eyes popping, the lips stretching. I cursed her theatricality. I wanted the news as calmly as I could have it. “She won’t escape unharmed. She won’t get out of this one. You wait. This is not over. He hates her, always did. She’s a troublemaker. Izn it? Even now he is walking down there”—she jerked her head to the far end of the Yoshiwara, towards the low-class canalside brothels—“looking for a good price for her.”

I
n an hour the news came to us: she was sold.

“Her new owner is very mean,” Mitsu said, “and the women do not look healthy.” Kind though she was, you could see the gleam in her eye as she fed on our suffering. “But it is not all bad,” she added cheerfully. “Now the blind masseur can afford her. You know he has been in love with her for years.”

W
E WAITED A WEEK
and then went at twilight to Shino’s new brothel.

It was a two-storey house, flimsy and unpainted, on a back street beside the dirty moat. The musty water gave off an odour. There would be no high Chinese chest, no velvet draperies. The women from these places did not dress in finery or promenade to the teahouses in the late afternoon. They sat inside the lattice on display.

And there she was.

The light was on her face but not on us. We stood to one side, nearly touching the verandah, looking at the little crowd as if we were inside with the courtesans, not on the street with the window shoppers. She was perfectly composed. She wore thick white makeup, and I couldn’t see the cut Jimi gave her.

A man crooked his finger.

Shino got up off her knees and walked, knees locked together, feet swinging out behind just a little, making the ends of her kimono sway like a tail, to the edge of the verandah. She looked over at us but gave no sign of recognition. She murmured something to the yobbo. Her manner was not very flirtatious, and the yobbo lost interest. She backed away and sat again.

The blind man came around the corner. He positioned himself in front of her, just as if he could see. His face was up, his ears wide, his fat tentacle fingers waving. The yobbo backed off. Mitsu had guessed right: the masseur had become Shino’s client.

I
visited her new brothel when I could.

It sat at the far end of the rectangle of land that was the Yoshiwara. There, the drained marsh reasserted itself; the street was always muddy, and as summer advanced there were mosquitoes. The proprietors didn’t bother with coloured lanterns or flowering trees. Each dark door was the same.

Just before noon most days, I could catch her when she emerged. Down here, beside the well and next to a tiny burial ground, was an old Buddhist temple, its red paint worn to flecks. It was a quiet place: no one else went there. I followed her, but she asked me to wait a little distance away while she prayed. When Shino came away she smiled.

“What is this praying? I never knew you prayed.”

“I have made mistakes,” she said. “I must pray to the gods for the strength to control myself.”

I waited, weaving in and out amongst the leaning gravestones of this famous courtesan or that. They had been buried here, once, with pomp, I supposed. But no one kept their graves. I spoke over the headstones, holding her from going back to her brothel. “One little mistake,” I said. “You didn’t hear him coming.”

“Oh, more than one. I have let the heat of my temper get the better of me.”

I did not see that as a mistake.

“Remember what I said,” she instructed. “When your anger goes out—”

“Your fist stays in.” I frankly did not see it.

“You must not feel pity for me.”

“I know. Do you have open-kitchen days? Are the other prostitutes funny?”

No, she said. And there would be no more classes in self-defence. “You can practise in your mind and no one has to know,” she said. She said she had quelled the demon of pride. She had learned to behave according to her station. “There is always someone watching.”

The blind man came often. He was possessive. I understood that he had a name, but I would not use it. She didn’t use Hokusai’s name either. “Your father,” she said to me sometimes, as if he were a man she did not know directly. She never asked me why he hadn’t stepped in. We knew the answer: to buy her, he would have needed money. And although he sometimes was well paid, sometimes there was no work. When we had money it went quickly. Where to was a mystery, and he became fierce and scornful if I asked him.

Meanwhile the sad, wispy woman alone turned up in picture after picture. Anyone could see Shino was the woman he painted walking under willows, holding umbrellas, waiting for lovers.

“You have one who watches you and one who sees you,” I said one day. “The blind man watches and Hokusai sees.” But the blind man’s watching was hopeless because he had no eyes. And even though my father saw her truly, saw who she was, he could do nothing.

“Maybe it’s the opposite,” she said. “The blind man sees me truly, without eyes, while your father only looks and sees the outside.”

“One puts you on paper and the other puts his hands on you.”

“Rude girl.”

I had nearly made her cry and I was glad. I was cruel. The blind man was her livelihood now, her only client. Shino had to treat him with deference. She made this her discipline, her spiritual training. If she made him happy, with any luck he would see her through her term in the Yoshiwara.

“He is taking the training to be a moneylender,” she offered. And then later, “He cannot come to me because he’s saving his money to buy the licence.”

I believed she had given me that message so I could tell my father, and I did.

U
TAMARO JOINED THE MAD POETS AGAIN
. His handcuffs, the chosen punishment for the “seated classes,” as they called us, were off. But his hands hung heavy in front of him like useless things in which he had lost interest. His skin was yellow. His hair had fallen out. The bridge of his nose, the famous proud, high bridge of his nose, was bony.

The boulevard gossips said that Utamaro was too tired to go on. They said that he had given up, and that all he wanted to do was speak about the old days.

Then suddenly, he was dead.

He died of the handcuffs, people said.

They talked of nothing else.

No one dies of handcuffs. He was an old man already.

He died of the humiliation of the handcuffs.

No, he did not. They could not humiliate Utamaro.

But he couldn’t paint with them on.

They’d been removed.