The Ghost Brush (22 page)

I
t was eleven o’clock in the morning, the Hour of the Snake. The clouds spun across the sky, lit from above as a sharp wind came in off the sea. Smoky yellow and grey moved off, leaving a clear, cold blue. Sanba strode ahead making instructive comments, as this was for my edification. His voice was bigger than his frame.

“‘Edo is the land of splendour, and without it there would be no place to sell things’—have you heard that famous line?”

I had.

“It’s mine,” he said. “I said it first.” He tried again: “There are three places where one thousand gold ryo change hands during the space of a day. Can you guess what they are?”

“The fishmarket is one,” I said.

“Yes.”

“The Yoshiwara must be another.”

“You are too smart.”

I pretended I didn’t know the third.

“And the kabuki district.”

“Ah.” I scuttled behind him.

“Come up, don’t lag!” he commanded. “You are my companion, not my servant.”

The Yoshiwara had burned to the ground. Again. We picked our way over the wasteland of broken timbers and ash, and discussed the rumour that the inhabitants had burned it down themselves. Certain courtesans had been charged with arson. Sanba was on their side.

“Good riddance to the place,” said Sanba. “It’s not what it was. No fun at all unless you like brigands wearing black hoods.”

He showed me a cellar where, he said, prostitutes were tortured. The house above it had collapsed. “It won’t be the end of the cruelty,” he predicted. “The owners have been given permission to relocate for a year, and they’re ecstatic. Things will be even worse: there won’t be any rules in the temporary quarters.”

We passed the area designated New Yoshiwara. Brothel houses were going up faster than shingles could be found: like our tenement, they were sided with the sake-barrel wrappings, a paper in abundance at all times. A troop of blind people with shaved heads moved together across the rough ground, singing out directions to one another.

We got a ferryboat along the Sumida, and Sanba stretched his arm along the gunwale. “I’m taking you from one evil place to another,” he said.

The Nakamura: I had walked by it many times, but I had never been in. It was not only for lack of money but also for lack of time.

“It’s where I am most days. When the orchestra plays the first strains of music I’m in my little seat close to the stage. Although sometimes more goes on in the audience than it does on the stage. I get splashed by water and mud. I never go out to get food. I just wash down a few bean-jam buns with tea. I never get tired of it.”

“Why?”

“It’s an immersion into the whole business of being human, that which Buddhists tell us is of no importance.”

“I take it you are not religious.”

He laughed.

It was opening day and tickets were free. Men were beating the drums from the turret of the three-storey wooden theatre. The outside was hung with prints and advertisements and paper lanterns. We pushed through the sellers of sticky rice balls, hot teas, eels, and souvenirs. The crowd was mostly men, but there were a few women. A lady of the court hid her face under the deep slant of an umbrella, finely ribbed and dyed a beautiful eggplant colour. Members of Danjuro VII’s fan club were lined up with his crest on their kimono, on their headscarves, even on their umbrellas. They were already shouting out praises.

“Nothing to do with the show. They’ve got their opinions memorized,” said Sanba.

Facing the crowd, on the verandah of the theatre, were dancers with scarves tied under their chins. They fluttered fans from cocked wrists. Women were not allowed to perform. These were men imitating women.

“Even so, the law demands that they be unattractive,” murmured Sanba, “to protect our morals.”

We were in no danger.

A man with a yoke over his shoulders sold watermelon. Sanba bought me some. I loved its colour, red verging to crimson to pink, the crunchy flesh, the sweet juice, the black shiny seeds and the way you could spit them.

No one had ever bought me anything just because of a gleam in my eye. I ate and slurped and spat happily. As we waited, the kago-bearers pushed through. Sanba carefully took the watermelon rind from my sticky fingers.

“Here come the investors,” Sanba said. “If the play is popular, they’ll be rich men. Or they’ll be paupers. It depends on what I say.”

He gave his little self-mocking grin.

Out of their sedan chairs stepped the sleek, well-dressed men. They checked in all directions to see that their heavy coats were being admired, then shrugged the silk up their shoulders, shook out the folds, and faced the theatre. They nearly pawed the ground with their feet, so eager were they to get inside. I saw the investors’ pasty, broad-cheeked faces and knew they were very nervous. I thought one or two of them gave Sanba a glance.

“You see how a cosmetics seller from the wrong part of town can get a little power?” he said. “They recognize me. They want a good review. But oh no, no, no. My good opinion can’t be bought,” he said.

The front row of people pressed closer and closer to the verandah, where the shapely male dancers minced and flipped their fans. Guards came to push them back. Sanba pulled me out of the way. A manager crooked his finger at us from the side door, and we were in.

In our box seats Sanba’s knees were crammed against the barrier. Mine didn’t reach. Above us were wooden timbers and more boxes where women sat fanning themselves from excitement. Below was the pit where labourers camped out with food for the day. I looked down on a mass of turning, tilting heads, ear to ear and nose to nape—I couldn’t see between them. A long wooden ramp stretched overhead from the back of the theatre to the stage. This was the hanamichi where the great Danjuro would appear when his moment came. His fan club was going wild behind us. Actors, like us, were not officially counted as persons, but if Ichikawa Danjuro VII was not a person, I thought, he must be a very rich horse or cow.

Sanba bought me a booklet to explain the play. The paper was soft and the pages clung to each other. I held it to my chest and hoped he would let me keep it.

“I was going to take you to see a play of domestic realism,” Sanba laughed, “but I thought perhaps you had had enough of that.”

“Rude.”

“Instead we will see a play about severed affection. The plot goes this way: A woman declares she is out of love with her lover and urges him to discard her, but she does not mean it. She is doing this for his good. The lover does not understand her sacrifice and murders her. Her ghost comes to haunt him, with the intention of protecting him, but instead it drives him mad.”

I still went to storytelling halls when I had time. “I know a lot of ghost stories,” I said, “but that sounds more improbable than most.”

“Do you think so? On the contrary. Those reverses are all too familiar to me. You see, Ei, your father has not prepared you for life. You only know reprobates. You are sheltered from the disastrous hypocrisy and conventions of proper people.”

The story made no sense, but I loved the roaring, the postures, the applause, and the abuse. I watched the way the actors’ faces worked while painted white, with red lines across the cheeks. I forgot the dragging hours and lived inside the wrenching, overdone lives. When it was finally over and we got out into the tainted sunset, I felt as if I had two sets of eyes, my usual and a new set. I towered over my own body and looked down from above. Sanba and I had screamed and suffered as one. Now in the cold, damp air I moved closer to his body. And he pressed against me, once, and then moved away.

Would I like to meet the great Danjuro VII? Who wouldn’t? I climbed the stairs to the actor’s dressing room on the third floor feeling proud: everyone treated Sanba with respect. “Welcome, teacher. Come and see, give us your thoughts. What did you think?” they asked.

At the top Sanba called out. The door opened and there was Danjuro the man, diminished to a fraction of his size. The costume was gone, he was perspiring, and the makeup was tacky on his face. Sanba produced a cloth from the folds of his kimono. “Would you mark this cloth for her?”

The great actor took the square of cotton, opened it like a book, and laid it on his two palms, flat. He looked at us.

“I see sparks flying.”

“You see no such thing,” says Sanba. “This is Hokusai’s daughter. I am saving her from toil.”

Danjuro raised his painted eyebrows. The effect was large in the narrow doorway.

“I hear the great artist uses his daughters as models for the shunga—”

“That is mere gossip,” said Sanba shortly.

“Gossip!” said Danjuro. “Shikitei Sanba complains of gossip?” He laughed, and his laughter floated over us like a ticklish, escaped feather.

I reddened.

“Better to stop talking and give us your face print.”

“Of course. I am your slave, critic,” said the great actor. “What will you write about my performance today? Never mind. Don’t tell me.” He turned his eyes to me. “And what do you think of the play? Will it succeed?”

I had nothing to say.

“It’s not a great play,” said Sanba, “but that may be in its favour. There is an appetite for these ghosts. It is the times.”

“They take everything your man here says with deep seriousness. I see the audience reading his reviews even in my finest moment,” said Danjuro. He began to laugh, Sanba with him.

People called for Danjuro to appear. But he was in no rush. He held the square of cotton. Then rapidly and fiercely, the actor pressed his face into the cloth as it lay stretched out in the palms of his hands. He pressed the cloth into his face, and his face into the cloth, and held it very still. Then, in a moment, he lifted it. He passed the cotton to me. His features were on it. Eyebrows, nose, lips, cheek gashes. It was a print, a seal of his face.

S
anba and I went to a restaurant on a boat tied up along the river. It was dark and dank and narrow. I suppose it was a place where no one would see us. And that seemed important, all of a sudden. Angled walls—we were down in the belly of the boat—and dark wood made it cozy. Sanba lit me a pipe with a match string he held over the tip, and passed it back. I inhaled deeply and felt the smoke burn my throat and my eyes. I drank some sake. The owner approached; he joked about picking up women. He must have meant me. Sanba was apparently the expert. He had come here before with a girl. This delighted me: I was glad to be in experienced hands. The owner fed him more than sake and soya beans—he fed him questions that Sanba could dilate on for the entertainment of those few men slurping their noodles at the bar.

“Hey, Sanba, if I want to seduce a Buddhist nun, how should I go about it?”

“Confidently,” he said. “They are amongst the very easiest.” He coughed and downed more sake. “Women become nuns on impulse and later are hungry for male company.”

“But it’s against their religion.”

“Not at all,” he said. “If the Buddha cautions against sex, it is because most people develop attachments. To fornicate is sweet and good. Just remain detached and there is no harm.”

I swayed on my heels where they dug into my buttocks and sucked softly on the pipe. I loved the rough, scalding smoke in my throat. It was like doing myself a violence, but one of strange comfort.

When we had eaten Sanba said he would show me where he worked. We walked to a small upper-floor room; a futon was on the floor. But something that had been said earlier had not left his mind.

“It is true what Danjuro said, then? Hokusai uses his daughters as models for the shunga?”

It was true; we modelled, in a way. But it did not merit such shocked gossip.

“Then you are not entirely innocent?”

“Not entirely.” I smiled.

I was untouched but not unseen. If I had lost something it was a gradual loss and not one that was thrust on me. It was true—I had been research for the shunga. It wasn’t only me but also my sisters, when they were younger. We slept in one room. My father had seen our kimono open to reveal thighs, buttocks sometimes. My breasts, which hardly existed, and the buds and folds between my legs—all these had been examined.

I did remember my mother hectoring from the step-down kitchen: “Why bother the girls? Go to the brothels for that. Better still, you have a wife.” But she was always instructing my father, always finding fault, telling him in a shrill voice that he had done something wrong. This wasn’t any different. The voice simply announced that this examination of Ei or Miyo or Tatsu was an irritation to her, and while it might be a matter of convenience to my father, it wasn’t—what?—good manners, or in keeping with her ideas of current style, or a thing you did with your family.

But scandal? No.

I was willing to help. Lying on my back, my legs waving as if I were an overturned beetle, I laughed, and so did my sisters. It was all for the pictures: my father had drawn my parts with great precision, afterwards comparing them to pictures he had seen in the Dutch anatomy books then circulating in Edo. My mother, far from being old-fashioned, the way he accused her of being, had an idea of privacy that would exist only in the future. We lived in small rooms; we were all there together, day and night. We heard one another and smelled one another and saw one another. I took my sisters’ clothes. They stole my drawings. We all searched for the coins my father earned and lost.