The Ghost Brush (2 page)

This is the beginning. The tiny tenement house. The mat on which we all lay, side by side; the soot-orange sun at dawn.

My birth was both lucky and unlucky. Lucky because I was born in the centre of this magic. First my father’s words defined me, and then his pictures did. And unlucky to be under the thumb of another, weightier, power. And a daughter. In that terrible time. Lucky and unlucky.

That is Ei’s story.

M
y first memory: I lay on my mat in the damp dark and the cold of whatever small room we shared. My father was working by the light of an oil lamp. Then he stood and blew it out. He opened the door to the night. White snow was emptying out of the heavens on us, thick as feathers. The snow erased the rooftops with its soft white brush, leaving only the thin, dark outline of tiles.

He lifted me in his arms and we went out to stand under the sky. We looked up. The snow fell straight down without fluttering, freighted, through the barren trees. There were no leaves to catch it. It melted on the lanterns: too warm. It fell around his feet and more snow followed. It blotted the ground, sopping up its colour, and then melted, making the packed earth gleam.

I lay in his arms, warm, with the cold, airy flakes landing on my eyes, my cheeks, and my lips. Tongue out, I tasted them. Laughed at the cold, and the warmth of him. How safe I felt! How loved! We were one being.

The snow was a gift. I licked my lips, where it tasted sweet. My father stared and sighed. I thought it was for happiness, for holding me. Now I know differently—he was puzzling how to catch it on the page—but then I was safe in illusion.

“What time is it?” my mother called.

“It is the Hour of the Rat,” he said. “The hour of romance.” Then he muttered under his breath, to me, “Or the hour of avoiding romance.” He sighed and looked up, searching for his favourite stars. But they were hidden.

Illusion is shaken, a little.

“Even a courtesan might delay awhile,” he said, “before necessity compels her to a client’s company. Examine herself in the mirror or tidy the empty glasses. But not for long: this is the hour. The hour of tyranny and love.”

What did he mean?

“Are you coming inside?” my mother called again.

Here my father laughed. I knew his laugh better than my own. It was a laugh not heartless but mirthless, a laugh that saw everything and presumed nothing. He was no romantic. He sucked at the hard tit of circumstances and made a game of it. He laughed as if he were a free man, and he laughed with rue because he wasn’t.

“Not yet! I hear the crier coming.”

“So what?” cawed my mother. “He’s not crying for you.”

We heard footsteps, footsteps slapping the wet stone. The crier rose out of nowhere with a hood on his head and ran through the streets, stopping on bridges to make his announcement, then covered his head again and ran on. He was a nameless runner for Kawara-ban, a small broadsheet that sometimes appeared. It was illegal: we were not allowed to know the news. So he ran at night, perhaps to alert us to famine in the north. Or rice riots in the south. Earthquake or fire at the other end of the roads, in Osaka or Kyoto. Arrests and sometimes deaths. Scandal about corrupt officials of the town. Some people said these stories were nothing but rumours and gossip. But we who watched the roadways into this huge city—the largest in the world—could confirm the disasters by the trail of starving peasants coming to Edo.

The Kawara-ban man came closer. I could see his dark form through the curtain of snow. I thought he must be afraid. But my father said no, he was not afraid. He was doing his job.

I know now that this was not true. Of course he was afraid. We were all afraid: fear was required of us. Failure to feel fear was an offence under the law. But some seemed not to be afraid. My father was one of these. He too did his job.

Now we could hear the crier’s voice. I understood the tone of the words but not their meaning.

“Look tomorrow! It will be posted. A new edict. New prohibitions. Artists and writers take care. Look tomorrow!”

My father held me more closely against his chest. He prayed. We went to bed.

D
aylight had come. A layer of white was on us and on every surface. It was beautiful. I scooped up light balls of it and pushed them into my mouth. We stood by the signboard and my father read aloud, stopping frequently for emphasis. A crowd of women, unable to read, formed around us.

Behold the Senior Councillor’s new edict. He speaks with the authority of the Shogun.

There have been books since times long past, and no more are necessary. Year after year people have applied themselves to useless tasks, including even picture books, and have obtained large fees for their products. This is thoroughly wasteful.

Newly published books will be regarded as strictly undesirable if they are depraved or a medley of unorthodox ideas.

Amorous books are not good for public morality.

Wicked children’s books ostensibly set in ancient times will be regarded as undesirable.

We will censor all matter intended for publication, including picture books, readers, and novels. The sign of the censor—in the form of a circular seal with the character
kiwame
—must be stamped onto the drawing for the print after inspection and then cut into the printing blocks.

Those pictures that do not pass the censors will be seized and burned. The blocks will be destroyed. Persons who disregard this order will be accused in court.

If the necessity to print a new book does arise, inquiries must be made at the City Commissioner’s office.

There will be no news reporting. You are reminded that this was decreed in earlier times. However, it continues. There will be no “true records” such as those that can be rented from lending libraries. These are baseless rumours and will be seized. The lending libraries will be closed.

“Blah, blah, blah,” said my father to the women. “Here we go. I’ll just get on to the end for you.”

They shifted and protested: they wanted to hear it all.

“I’m skipping all this part,” he said, pointing to columns of characters. “After this it degenerates into a harangue.”

The Senior Councillor repeats his determination and asserts the rightness of the Old Way. We are losing the distinction between the esteemed and the despised. You people desire to imitate your betters, and to raise yourselves. This must end. We will root out corruption and laxity, and enforce austerity and morality. We shall rid Japan of private interest, and the destructive powers of passion and desire.

That was the end. He turned around and made a deep theatrical bow. The people were caught between fear and laughter.

3

The Seven Stars

WHATEVER MY FATHER DID
, he did with a kind of double, lunging in but also holding back, as if he were his own shadow. He loved the crowd, but he also liked to stand aside, watching himself, the entertainer amongst us, remarking on how it looked. He saw himself eating or lying, making love. He was hugely amused by himself and all the rest of us. He was an artist first and last, an ordinary man rarely, in between.

That night he went inside, put me down, and lay beside my mother.

“What did the edict say?”

“No more pillow pictures. No more picture books. No more libraries.”

My mother shrieked and covered her head with a cloth.

“Be still, woman!” He yawned, as if it were not important. It made her hysterical.

For a time he had made his living painting calendars. He delineated the long months and the short months; they changed every year. But an edict had made it illegal for common people to own or sell such a calendar. Calendars could be issued only by licence of the Shogun; the Shogun alone was responsible for counting days and months, for celestial movement and changing seasons. He issued the only calendars that were allowed. Who could afford one of these official calendars? Only a lord or a lady.

But my father had not despaired. “A calendar is a handy thing. People want to know what day it is. It’s a good market, and we won’t give it up. There is a way.”

He began to make calendars that looked like simple pictures—a rooster or a chrysanthemum. Hidden inside the swirl of the flower petals or in the rooster’s feet were the characters giving the number of days. The townspeople would spot these and understand, and even enjoy the little game. The officials failed to notice, and we were saved, for a time.

But now it was books—picture books, storybooks, history books. Our mainstay.

My mother wept. “The bakufu have taken away the last thing. The last strand by which we cling to life . . .” She had her own dramatic flair.

“Just a moment!” said my father. This was a thing he often said. He had borrowed it from the kabuki stage. It created a dramatic pause, heralded a grand gesture. A wordless grimace and a moment to make strategy.

He jumped out of bed and pounced, legs and arms wide apart. He made us laugh. “We will make a new thing that he hasn’t thought to censor yet!”

We felt reassured; we would get around this one too.

We children all went to sleep. It was the best way to keep warm.

A
nother night:

The Old Man was working. It was rude to call him that, but that is what he was. Forty years already when I was born. Most men died by the time they were forty-five. I was with him. My mother had put the three older children down on the mat and lay sleeping beside them. She would wake up very early, when he was just lying down, and pluck at him to come to her for sex. This was not wise: how did they feed us four children who had already made our appearance? I never knew. But she was an impetuous soul. She must have been to marry him.

From my close proximity I could smell my father’s frustration.

“Look at this picture—it’s hopeless. Hopeless.” He acted out his feelings: artist flings down brush, covers eyes with fists.

I looked at the design. It was a view of the banks of the Sumida River, which ran through our city. There were tiny people and ox carts, bridges and boats everywhere. Not bad, I thought. He smacked it.

“Where is the life?” he cried, rhetorically. “You can’t smell the tannery downriver or the incense from the temple; you can’t hear ferrymen grunt as they’re poling on the river.”

He was harsh with himself. There were hundreds like my father who lived in that world and painted it, making shop signs, theatre sets, and the woodcut prints that were cheap and for sale everywhere. Since he had displeased his master and was discarded, we were on our own. It was difficult; there were always others, more willing, to do any work.

For a time he was a middleman of peppers. He bought red peppers from a peasant and sold them from his back. And sometimes he found a private commission for a laughing picture, one that told a little sexual story and was useful in its way. Artists were in fashion, out of fashion, only as good as the day’s work—that was their lot.

Once in a while he was famous, then he couldn’t sell. This was the way; he could not keep a good name. He had taken a new one recently. He called himself Sori.

I liked the picture. “It is good,” I told him. Still, he did have a point. It was maybe too pretty.

“What about the cries of the men being flogged on the grounds of the jailhouse? Fifty times for the light sentence, one hundred for the heavy? No no no no no. How about that glimmer of lantern light in the black canal water? I want the people who look at my pictures to hear the angry sob of a nighthawk”—that was a riverbank prostitute; I knew them already—“taken by force!”

He stomped around.

“You can’t feel the rain.”

He was wrong there. You could feel the rain. His rain was good.

“How to capture it all? I want it, want it. I need to learn. But how can I? There’s no teacher for what I need.”

I held out my arms to be lifted. I tried to melt into his body.

He walked in small circles and patted my back. It calmed him. The proper teacher was his ears and eyes.

“I know it’s in me. But how many years before I find it?”

W
ith a father like that my mission was clear: someone had to look out for him. Even now that he is long gone, if I close my eyes and breathe deeply I can bring him back. I can feel, in the muscles inside my thighs, his back and waist, where I clung to him as he jogged along. I feel the sweat of his neck on my arms. I lay my chest along his spine; his arms twine behind his back and turn so they prop up the sling, and I sit in the crossed palms of his hands. Oh, seduction. Oh, that safe nest of cupped fingers on my bottom. The warmth of them, the stir that only many years later I would know was sexual.

In my ears there is still the cold slosh of water against a wooden wharf and the charcoal sellers’ shouts in the alley. And in my nose I hold the musty air of autumn, the bitter chrysanthemum, the wet, smeared leaves on the stones. All of it, all of it now gone, a paper world, a weightless world, a world of mad colours and things that died.