The Ghost Brush (23 page)

I untied my obi in front of Sanba.

And yet.

It left me open. To him and to others. I had given something away before I knew I had it. I had to take it back so I could give it properly.

Sanba said to himself, “I seem to have made the decision to deflower Hokusai’s daughter.”

“Don’t ‘daughter’ me here,” I said. “I am Ei.”

“So you are,” Sanba said to me. “Relax.”

Difficult when under duress. “I’m trying,” I said.

“Don’t try, whatever you do,” he said. “That makes it worse.”

He touched me under my robes. His fingers were not soft but hard and probing. But they had expertise, I had no doubt. He knew just how to work through the furrows. My skin shrank. I hid my face. In hiding I came upon the smell of him, his chest, his kimono. I liked that part. I just didn’t like him touching my private places to try to make something happen. I didn’t want him to know how I worked.

But he continued on. I did not live up to normal performance standards. There was my reluctance to be known. There were some shocking parts that hurt. But somehow we got through.

And then I fell asleep, deeply. Sanba woke me from it and walked me home. I carried my square of cloth with Danjuro’s face print on it. At home I slid open the screen and the cold air entered the room.

Hokusai was still working. He did not look up. “You are home smelling of tobacco,” he said declaratively. “And relatively safe, I suppose.”

“Relatively,” I said.

We both lay down until morning.

T
HERE WAS NEWS IN THE YOSHIWARA
. So Mitsu told me when we dropped in to her shop. It concerned the courtesan Shino. The blind man had written a letter to the owner of the canalside brothel saying he would buy out Shino’s contract. I acted as if I didn’t know. “But that’s not all! Oh
no,
that’s only the start of so many complications!” That owner had asked for a certain sum to pay her debts. Then Jimi, her original owner, stepped in.

Mitsu laid her hand along her jaw as if she had a toothache. She grasped her countertop with one hand; the magnitude of the announcement might blow her off her feet.

“What complications?”

“Kana and Jimi say they still own her.”

“Jimi doesn’t. He sold her,” I said idly. I peered inside the display case wanting to see the seahorses, whose grace and fragility I loved. I wondered if I looked different since I’d been with a man, and if Mitsu would notice.

“He claims that he didn’t, that he was just punishing her, that he was about to take her back. He claims that she has debts with him too. He says he was acting in anger and the sale is not legal. He says the Corner Tamaya still owns her.”

“Then why don’t they take her back?”

I watched my father’s face to see if he flushed or showed guilt. He did not.

“It seemed it would all fall through. And here with a man willing and ready! A shame, izn it?” But, no surprise, money will solve it, the blind man will pay. He’s panting for her.”

It was rather graphic even for Mitsu, and I was rewarded with a slight flinch by Hokusai.

Mitsu moved out into the light of the street. I followed. “Jimi and Kana are insisting that they always loved her, that she was like a daughter to them. This is all for the benefit of the blind man, who can be milked for more and more money.”

She finally looked at me. She was alerted to a change. “Something’s different,” she muttered.

Hokusai’s lip curled. “How long will this take? She will not be beautiful forever.”

I laughed in his face. “The masseur is blind, Old Man. Does he know that she’s beautiful?”

“He knows,” said Mitsu. “His eyes have not, but his hands have seen her.”

Why did we say these words? They were hurtful to everyone. We were silent and moved apart. Mitsu developed a furrow between her eyes. Then she clapped her hands, like a babysitter calling the children.

“Never mind! Shino is making history. She’s the only woman in the Yoshiwara who has been sold three times and will be free by her twenty-seventh birthday.”

So Shino would marry. She could dress in plain indigo cotton, woven in stripes, like any townswoman. To our shame, neither my father nor I expressed gladness for her. We walked on with Mitsu still talking.

“Oh, and that’z another thing. The blind man has family! Like worms they’ve crawled out of the woodwork. Just a poor dumb masseur stumbling around the pleasure quarters and he had nobody, but now he’s a moneylender”—she brushed her thumb and forefinger together—“we find out he’s got parents and a brother, all living in the suburbs.” This little cynical snip of life amused her and she started to laugh, and tears wobbled on her cheekbones.

“So where is Shino now?”

Mitsu lifted her shoulders slowly, grandly, and dropped them. She fixed her dark pupils on me. “I don’t know.”

I
went to the canalside brothel at twilight. Shino was not sitting behind her lattice. I was thankful but apprehensive. I asked one of the other women where she’d gone. “Corner Tamaya,” the white-faced shape said out of the side of her mouth where she knelt in the lamplight.

At the Corner Tamaya, Kana opened her arms to me.

“A woman you’ve become, izn it?”

“It is.” I was happy and blushing. “How do you know?”

“I can see it. You have a secret smile.”

I smiled, not secretly.

“You’ve come to see Shino. I know. You are so happy for her. But she is not available.”

“Oh.”

“She’s getting ready. This is her number-one day. Her last parade. Yes, her debt will be paid, you know. She will go out of the pleasure quarter a free woman. We wanted to do this much for her.”

“What is she doing?”

“The hairdresser has come. She is putting on her makeup. Putting on her lovely kimono for the last time.” Kana opened her hands once more to show there was no limit to what the brothel would do for her. “Then she will give it away. She will give away her bedding too, tonight.”

I couldn’t imagine anyone would want it.

The retirement parade was a ritual, although it was rare to see it. “Go on, now. Come back in a few hours and you’ll see her.”

I
stood by the side of the boulevard. They came out of Corner Tamaya at twilight, the courtesans Fumi II and Yuko walking on either side of Shino. She did not stumble on this, her last public march, but smiled faintly, distantly straight ahead and held her chin up. The apprentices came behind carrying boxes of “gifts,” and the “boy” who carried the waste, that pathetic old man, paraded last.

There was a crowd.

“There she is, the yakko. Can you see the scar?”

“She walks beautifully, izn it? There won’t be one like her again.”

“She deserves her freedom. She was kind and good.”

Retirement was a kind of death to a courtesan. A good death: an end to that life of serving men. Her name would die too, I supposed. I wondered what name she would take tomorrow. She would be an ordinary woman, and she would leave the Corner Tamaya as a daughter left her parents’ house, to go to her new husband—that is, after he had handed over the money. Tomorrow there would be no more Shino. Who would she be? I wondered.

My friend looked neither right nor left. Her eyes saw no one: they weren’t supposed to. She looked straight ahead into the future and did the figure-eight step with perfect balance. Each step ended with a little circle kick out the back, which signified her tossing off this world of debauchery.

I meant to go back home, but I couldn’t leave her. I went back to the Corner Tamaya and coaxed Kana to let me inside. Shino was not allowed outside that night, in case she ran. I came in to see her seated in front of her oval mirror while Fumi shaved off her eyebrows. It was the custom for married women. Fumi soaped the arch of soft black hairs that had always informed me ahead of time of Shino’s mood, whether it was dangerous or not. Then she pulled them out, one by one.

“You’ll have a wide forehead, to be in the wide world,” said Yuko. The women tittered.

“Your hair will be down and you will wear the blue stripes of the townswoman.”

All these good wishes! Hanging over the screen were a wedding kimono of white silk and a dress for after the ceremony, made of red silk. The blind man had given the fabric. His family waited for her. They had come to dinner to meet her the night before, and she had charmed them with her koto and her dance. She had spoken to them of poetry and religion, just as she ought.

“You shuddv heard her: she wz fabulous. We listened behind the screen,” said one of the apprentices. “The way she talks ’z music!”

The last part of the ritual took place in the kitchen. The maids brought a large bowl of water. The Yoshiwara was marshy land, originally. Before leaving it, a retiring courtesan washed its mud off her feet. Shino’s feet were narrow and arched, unblemished. They would be clean when she started her new life.

She sat on a stool and put one foot in the bowl, wincing from the cold. We each took a turn, soaping one foot and then the other. Yuko tried to remove the bowl; a fresh bowl of rinse water was on the way. She slipped and nearly fell, catching herself on another girl’s shoulder. That girl pushed back. Shino dipped her toe down and sent a perfectly aimed spray at Kana’s face. I put my hand in the bowl and swept out a great wave.

“Aeeii, you little shit! I’m soaked!” Fumi got control of the bowl, dumping half of it on me. “Let’s wash off those sins!”

“You’re terrible! More water!” Everyone was splashing and sliding across the wooden floor and laughing.

I got no chance to ask Shino what her mother-in-law was like. I heard that her dowry belongings had been carried to the in-laws’ house already: her box of shells, her white face paint, her black brush and tweezers, even her long pole with the blade on the end, the naginata, reclaimed after these years from Shirobei, the guard at the gate. Now they had everything but her. I hoped it was true what they all said, that the family would accept her as the daughter they needed. After all, the son they had to offer was damaged goods as well, wasn’t he? I begged Kana to let me sleep over. My father would think I was with Sanba. But I wanted to stay at the brothel as I had when I was a child, one more time.

And I did: we lay on her mattress.

“What name will you take?” I said. “What was your name before?”

“I will not retire my name. I have discussed it with my husband. The young wife who was sent here is dead. But Shino is not. We have enough name changes in our lives, don’t you think?”

In the morning we rose late. Her new white feet she put into socks. Socks! Allowed for the first time in nearly ten years! Her feet had always been cold. We wrapped her in the new kimono. She grasped me by the shoulders as soon as she saw me and asked me to carry her bedding to the women on the canalside. “They need it,” she said.

The ceremony was nearly the same as a funeral. Jimi and Kana had lit torches at either side of the door, to signal the departure of a dead body. The blind man and his brothers came to the front door with a palanquin. Kana tossed rice grains in the little carrying box to purify it. Then Shino stepped inside, and the porters lifted it for her journey back across the Bridge of Hesitation. I saw no more of her.

I missed her terribly for almost a full year. But when the date of her marriage came around again, I stopped hating her and began to understand what it is to stay alive. We ourselves were working from dawn until the light fell. I thought I might one day see her at Nihonbashi or near the theatres, her hair tied and hanging down her back, loosed from its artificial courtesan’s mound. It was one reason I loved to do the outside errands. But Edo was so enormous. I supposed there was little hope of our meeting by chance.

19

The Painting Competition

ON CERTAIN OCCASIONS
Sanba dropped by the studio, diffident in his plain black kimono. Could I come to the theatre?

Once, after we had made our plans, Hokusai looked over and said, “You think you are pulling one over on your old man, don’t you?”

“No, I don’t.”

But he didn’t stop me.

In the theatre I entered the melodrama of my times. I watched depraved sons and greedy merchants. I liked the warrior plays, stories set in the long-ago past but understood to represent the politics of Edo. Evil murderers, virtuous wives: I loved the suffering the actors put up onstage. I shouted along with the mob. Sanba called me a true believer.

After, to calm ourselves, we sat and smoked. I critiqued. I’d say an actor was heaven to look at or getting long in the tooth. A writer must live with his head down a mole hole. Or the costumes made my mouth water. “I just like to hear you talk, Strong-jawed Woman,” Sanba would say. I could make him laugh, especially if I drank sake. And if he drank sake, he wanted to take me to bed. I must have pleased him a little, or he wouldn’t have kept asking. I’d creep home before dawn, when the stars were still visible, in the Hour of the Ox. My father would unfailingly be hunched over his work.