The Ghost Brush (31 page)

Six months after his arrival at Nagasaki, Phillip wrote to his uncle in Holland that he was happy. (When had he ever been unhappy?) He said: “I have temporarily become quite attached to a sweet sixteen-year-old Japanese girl, who I would not willingly exchange for a European one.”

W
ITHIN A YEAR VON SIEBOLD
had permission to build a medical school in a pretty valley with a waterfall. He went there freely most mornings, lectured all day, and returned to the island at night. He had amassed a big collection of plants and added to it constantly. He sent new species—hydrangea, cypress, delphinium, cherry, iris—back to Europe every time a ship left. And he had objects. With the lower class of people, he found bribery successful in getting them to part with their treasures. With the educated, he made exchanges—his knowledge for theirs. As far as officials went, it was easy to convince them that they saw nothing by offering his expertise in questions of their family health.

Otaki came to the island. She was allowed to live with him, given her new status. Her presence was far more effective in his learning Japanese than the chart of kana on the wall of the toilet. He had been on the island only two years when she was on the table, labouring under his hands. The child was a female, and von Siebold loved both his wife and his daughter very much. He was sad that the two were forced to move off Deshima, but on this point the laws of Japan did not bend, not even for the Miracle Doctor. Mrs. von Siebold would live with her child in her father’s home, and the child would belong to Japan. Phillip visited them every day. He now had a clinic under the whispering waterfall; the grateful Japanese built a house for him, and he stayed there many nights himself. It was strictly forbidden, but no one seemed to notice. Students stood in groups five deep to watch him as he did operations. “They hang on my lips,” he told Otaki. She laughed because you could not say that in Japanese: it made a ridiculous picture.

Perhaps the only sour note was his relationship with the opperhoofd. A certain strain existed there. But even that seemed to be easing. De Sturler had spoken to him: soon the Dutch mission must travel to Edo to give tribute to the Shogun.

Von Siebold would join the procession.

I
N LATE FEBRUARY THE SNOW WAS GONE
from the hills, and the white tips of the hostas were inches above the soil. The buds on the plum trees were swollen and von Siebold’s daughter was two years old by the Japanese count, which gave her one year at birth. Nearly sixty Japanese and three Dutch set off to walk the six hundred miles to the Eastern Capital. They carried food, silver, glassware, and furniture—including the piano—and many gifts for the Shogun. Von Siebold packed his tools—barometers, chronometers, sextants. He intended to measure and record everything he passed. A Japanese draftsman hired to draw the sights walked alongside. Von Siebold himself sat in a sedan chair and made notes as he, a European, one of only a handful ever to go there, passed through the forbidden countryside.

Word had spread. Peasants grouped by the wayside with curiosities: the miscarried fetus of an albino deer, a child with seizures, a beautiful shell. They stood in the rain and waited for hours.

The guards were at first suspicious and later lax, allowing von Siebold to get down, minister, and take gifts. One day the servants caught a giant salamander with a head like an arrow, a long spiny body, and a pointed tail. It was five feet long and looked prehistoric. Von Siebold had them build a cage and sent it back to Deshima with instructions that the servants feed it rats, which were plentiful under the floorboards.

He jolted along in his enclosed chair on the shoulders of the bearers for many days. Then suddenly, mystically, the white cone of Mt. Fuji appeared against the sky. He jumped down and got out his sextant to measure its height. There were murmurs of discontent amongst the guards. Von Siebold got back into his sedan, and they walked on.

But there was Mt. Fuji again. He insisted on being let down to measure it. The canny peak seemed to leap out at them, first from one direction and then from another. Eventually, not to upset the guards, he hid his sextant and compass in his hat and pulled them out only when he thought no one was watching. From then on, whenever he saw the mountain raise its perfect head, he stepped out of the procession and surreptitiously measured it.

A
FTER WALKING FOR TWO MONTHS
the procession arrived in Edo. It was April 10, 1826, he noted. Here, unlike in friendly Nagasaki, he felt like a freak. Crowds clogged the streets to see the three tall, red-haired barbarians. The Dutch were immediately closed up in Nagasakiya House to await their audience with the Shogun. Important scientists came calling. They were the
rangaku-sha,
and many had been newly named by the former
opperhoofd.
Mogami was there. Genseki, the court physician, was there. Takahashi Sukuzaemon, the court astronomer, was now called Globius.

These men wanted books, and they brought documents to trade. But von Siebold knew you could learn as much or more from the images the Japanese made. His predecessor had bought a pair of scrolls from the painter Hokusai. One scroll was much admired and the other was considered to have had a spell cast on it: whoever owned it took sick and died. This Hokusai, von Siebold believed, was a court painter. He asked that he too be brought to the Nagasakiya.

24

Meeting

A LITTLE FELLOW CAME TRIPPING
into our slum with a message: the Dutch Miracle Doctor wanted to meet the court painter Hokusai.

“Court painter!” I fell over sideways, laughing.

My father gave no sign he heard. This was his way, more and more often. But I was all ears. Maybe the red-haired barbarian would buy paintings. His predecessors had. Times were grim, and I remembered how in years before we’d briefly prospered on the Dutch trade.

The Old Man was annoyed that day. It was not a significant irritation. I can’t even remember it. Maybe the message itself put him off. He never liked anyone important. Sycophants too had to be put in their place. Maybe he remembered the old insult from Captain Hemmy, who tried to buy the scroll at half-price. Maybe he was thinking of the bitter words between himself and my mother on the subject of that famous payment of 150 ryo. He was sentimental about her now she was gone.

For whatever reason, my father sat picking the rows of black paint from under his fingernails and refused to meet the Dutchman.

I came out of the house squinting. The daylight dazzled me; it was dark where we worked, so dark that now my father was lifting his pages up to his nose and peering at them. Feeling unsteady on my sandals and displaced—as if I myself were cut out of a book of pictures and pasted onto this scene—I set out.

I was a simple townswoman in her indigo blue cotton-print kimono and jacket, with a few coins and some papers tucked in her sleeve. Neat enough: hair wound tight in a bun at her neck, no makeup, not slender but rounded now. I passed through a market and bought myself some grilled eggplant and tofu mixed in a sweet, peppery sauce. Delicious.

I sucked my fingers, one after another. I didn’t get out often enough. I concentrated so fiercely on my work. Now I could see changes out here in the big city—more countryfolk surrounded the vendors, if that was possible. Women in clusters crowded a fabric-sellers’ stall where bolts of patterned silks and velvets were stacked up to the roof. There were wooden toys for sale everywhere, spinning tops and something you rubbed between your palms to make it fly up into the air. Howling dogs and competing vendors and chains of monks.

This was the life my father couldn’t be without. I too could enjoy it. A man hailed me from across the aisle—the candy vendor Hokusai visited faithfully.

“How’s your old man?”

“Excellent!” I gave my tight smile. It was an unfamiliar feeling on my face. “Better and better.”

Only his friends knew about the palsy. The sweets were a regular delivery and part of Hokusai’s plan to cure himself. I waved and strode past, breathing more deeply, on my errand to the Dutch, feeling proud. I thought, It is true that I am only a woman and I have a thrusting chin and a shabby kimono, but I represent the finest artist in the land, and this is the proof.

The guards at the Nagasakiya bowed me in. And I was in his presence.

The Miracle Doctor astonished me. He was tall and not red-haired at all. His hair was golden, like sheaves of grain. He had broad shoulders and a narrow waist and long, thin legs. His eyes were intense blue. He towered over me but bowed to my height, and looked at me openly, kindly.

My little lecture to myself had worked. I was not intimidated. In fact I was awash in his glory. I felt accepted by those eyes. I softened. My face came unstuck from its rigid, defensive expressions. My eyes cast modestly down, I found myself eager to talk.

“My father, the great master, is at this moment deeply engaged in a large work and unable to be here.” Sanba had told me I had dimples in my cheeks that I could use to my advantage. I used them, probably for the first time ever.

The Dutch doctor showed no surprise. I was astonished to be speaking Japanese with a barbarian. And we understood each other! What he didn’t say in words, he indicated with his deep-socketed eyes and giant brows, which lifted and lowered to add feeling. Oh, what a beautiful man he was. Hardly a man, like another creature altogether, a finer one.

U
sually the Japanese did not examine him; he examined them. But this young woman stared openly. He could see her tracing his face, and he felt its difference from hers: his shaggy eyebrows where she had a small, thick ridge indicating she was unmarried; the caverns of his eyes, darkened with lack of sleep, where she had bright sharp stones that seemed to pop out of their lids.

Hokusai’s daughter was small, and not as feminine as some of the women here, yet possessed of a certain charm. Her face was diamond-shaped, wide at the jaw with a square-ended, thrusting chin giving her an inquisitive look. She had large ears, and a voice pitched strangely low for a Japanese woman. She was not well dressed, which must have been an artist’s affectation. Nor did she bow.

He found her lack of shyness refreshing and mildly challenging. She spoke to him as an equal, a thing he had never experienced before with a Japanese woman. She said her father was in his sixty-seventh year.

“An old man!”

“He has boasted that since I was born,” said the daughter. “But now it has become true.”

“What is he working on?” he said.

“Beautiful women not so much any longer.” She became a little vague. “Peasants in the countryside, views of natural wonders . . .”

He asked to see some of Hokusai’s paintings, and the woman said she would return. He went to his desk to take notes for the book he would one day write about the Japanese character. What was this pride in being old? He had heard it said that death was the high point of a man’s life. And this lack of respect for conventions by the artist’s daughter? They were eccentrics—if such a thing were possible in Japan.

So many contradictions! The government of course was two-faced. The announced strictures were extreme. Yet punishments were applied only in opportunistic circumstances. He was summoned here and then ignored. He was not to explore, but official scientists called on him with official questions. The Japanese navigated these layers without much difficulty. But he found them inexplicable.

Take Japanese women, for instance. The rare sophisticated woman ran a family inn or store. Others, earthier, were skilled in weaving or silk production. But even the most independent of them withered in the presence of a male relative. Women, he observed, had no social context of their own. They rarely appeared alone in public; it was positively Arab that way. Here was the greatest puzzle: there appeared to be no coercion. Women were willing partners in their own invisibility. Why was the Japanese woman so dependent, her very existence defined by obligation?

And yet, as seen today, why was the opposite evident, at least this once?

He put down his pen and laid his head on his Western pillow in his Western bed, carted all the way from Nagasaki. He might learn more from this strange daughter when she returned.

W
HEN I TOOK PAINTINGS
to the Nagasakiya, he offered me tea. And a sweet cake that I found delicious. The Miracle Doctor told me about his journey, about how, at each stop along the way, he had pulled out his telescope and looked at Fuji-san in its virgin beauty. He measured it again and again, and wrote down his observations while he was being carried in the sedan chair he called his flying study.

“But was the height of Fuji-san different, from different places along the road?” I said.

“Of course! It depends on where you are looking from.”

This astonished me. I thought the mountain must always maintain the same height. He laughed to see my pondering. “Of course it is a trick of the mind. Don’t you see?”

“The mountain is a god,” I observed.

“It has no magical powers,” he said shortly. “But it appears to change when our position changes. It is we who go up and down. So we were actually measuring not the height of the mountain but the lay of the land.”