The Ghost Brush (35 page)

All of this the storyteller mimed. It might have been true or it might have been just an excuse for some crowd-pleasing action. People were leaning with him, and gasping, and it was a lot of fun, and they weren’t too concerned about the poor Dutch doctor from what I could see.

Now he was wading, waves bashing the back of his knees. He tried to catch things flying by—bushes and flowers, the little wrought-iron bench, a watering can. But it was hopeless. The little plants were drowning; his Otaki hydrangeas were swept away; his primroses, past bloom and crouching out of harm’s way, were under a foot of water; his lilies were sinking. And the seedlings were packed on the ship. Would all this be gone? A shriek came out of him. A vicious slap of water hit his cheek.

He did not understand: the sea did not come here; the sea was kept out by the wall. But the sea had broken through. Through the gap he could see the ship tethered, rocking, its sails bound tightly, its timbers creaking horribly. He prayed for the anchor to hold. He thought he would be swept away.

“What happened?” I shouted along with others. “Get to the point! You beat around the bush too much!” He looked me in the eye.

But he was not to be so lucky.

The typhoon had hit just in time to forestall his escape.

And it would have been an escape, that which only a few days ago had seemed banishment.

Suddenly he was sailing sideways, his feet above his head, to the western side, where he banged up against a wall of the warehouse. Inside the pigs and goats were bawling. The servants must be with them, he assured himself, trying to peel himself off the wooden wall. It was not for him to save a pig. The warehouses were being battered. He was being battered. How ridiculous to be imprisoned here, on a flat piece of reconstituted land, right in the eye of the storm!

Waves like mad dogs raced in through the breach in the wall, one after another, splitting on contact and shooting both ways. They tore planks from the side of the warehouse. These sailed away on the surface of the water and became weapons.

Where was everyone? Had they fled out the City Gate? No one came as crates of precious things begin to slide out of their storage places on sleek, glassy floors of water. Within minutes the near warehouse wall had softened and buckled. A high examination table floated out of the sickbay: this was where his daughter was born. His instruments—his acupuncture needles, a sealing jar of formaldehyde with a lobster inside—bobbed in the water. Tiles crashed off the roofs onto the stone.

He tried to walk, but the water picked him up and twirled him. Rain and wind blinded him. He was furious. He got down on his knees and crawled back to the shelter of the main house. His fellow Dutchmen were gathered there and stood watching as the pigs floated away, squealing in terror.

The audience loved this. What a diverting story! What a thrill to see this man, who had set himself above us all, caught out by nature and brought down. I was ashamed. This was our society; this was how we were—powerless, rumour-gripped, taking pleasure in catastrophe brought down by gods on anyone who tried to escape.

The ship was pushed up on the side of the harbour, damaged but afloat. The crates of treasures were unloaded and stacked to dry. The Dutchman survived, but the Japanese were not so lucky. Thousands drowned, or were hit by falling roof tiles, or were swept to sea.

The crowd stirred in anger, that the Dutchman’s punishment should become their own.

Still, the Miracle Doctor who tempted the gods will be caught. He has not departed. The ship will take three months to be repaired. The garden cannot be salvaged. Von Siebold himself is trying to appease the gods by helping with rescue work. He travels in the towns, amputating crushed limbs, suturing gashes, and wrapping broken skulls.

Now something worse than a storm has come. It is the call. Under guard, he must go before the governor of Nagasaki to be interrogated. The authorities have seen that he was stealing valuable treasures. Granted privileges, the Dutch doctor has repaid the Japanese with treachery.

There was general gasping and outrage.

Von Siebold had eighty-nine chests and thousands of other items, animal, mineral, and vegetable. He says he does not know where they came from. He says that the cargo was loaded by others. He simply cannot explain the treasures, except that he knows they are his. All the while he is relieved, because the greatest has not come to light. He has it hidden deep inside his house.

But that is not the end of it. The plot grows wider. The most powerful men in the realm are swept into it. Takahashi the court astronomer, the man they call Globius, has been dragged out of his library and thrown in jail. He has traded maps with von Siebold; he himself may be a Russian spy. The plot has reached into the very heart of the castle.

People were torn between thrill and horror. They feared everything because in the end they suffered it, and they understood nothing because they were never given any reasons. Only the gods, shifting their furniture, could bring down such heavy punishments to earth.

And do you know the very worst of it?

The hall fell silent.

Von Siebold saw the guards turning a man away from the City Gate. He was cloaked for travel and worn out.

“What is wrong, my friend?” He peered into the grizzled face and saw bruises. He recognized the man: a translator from the Shogun’s entourage.

“You have to watch out for these translators,” called a listener, obviously a practised one, from the front rows. “They are always two-faced.” I was immobilized with dread. This was a masterful story. It was too good to be invented. It had to be true.

The doctor invited the traveller inside to get warm. He had brought a warning: von Siebold’s home was going to be searched. The translator himself had been arrested and beaten. “I was freed only because I promised that I would come here and find all your maps and pictures so we can use them as evidence against you.”

“Then you must save yourself,” said von Siebold. “But first we will make copies.”

His most important map was of the Russian islands far to the north of our capital. The two of them sat up all night and copied it. The original he placed where it could be found. The copy he rolled in a can and stuffed in a hole in the log wall behind his piano. Here he also placed certain other papers, including pictures he had bought showing the Shogun’s castle and secret rituals of our people. They were so valuable that he had not sent them to the ship to be packed: he imagined he would carry them in his clothing. He hid daggers in the flower containers, in case he needed to defend himself.

Two days later, von Siebold watched as the guards found his precious maps and took them away.

“Did they find and confiscate the pictures he bought from Edo artists?” I shouted. The storyteller looked through me as if he knew. But how could he?

“Not yet,” he said.

The guards laughed at his hidden daggers. Then they sat down at the gates of Deshima and forbade him to leave the island. Every week the soldiers pull him from his desk and march him up to the governor’s house, where he is asked the same questions. He refuses to admit he has done wrong. He names no one.

27

Flight

I WENT HOME SLOWLY
along our street with my packages. The wind whipped at the laundry—little children’s shirts—that was strung on poles. The wild cats were out prowling for fishbones. The always curious neighbours squinted at me. One woman was at the well, raising a bucket by the pulley wheel. She pulled it towards her while the wind pushed it away. All of these details were clear in my mind.

A young woman knelt in front of a fulling block with her pounding tool raised high. Whump, whump, it went as she brought it down time and again on the cloth stretched over the block in front of her. She looked purposeful and even happy. Her baby sat propped in his bucket beside her. A larger child sat on the edge of the house swinging her feet over the mud.

Von Siebold names no one, I thought. I believed it: the man had character. But there were our paintings. Not signed, but perhaps recognizable as by Hokusai. Would we too be arrested?

The woman beckoned me. “There was a big noise from your rooms,” she whispered.

My heart thumped.

“There was?” I said. I suddenly had no feeling.

“A man came out running,” she whispered. “I haven’t seen your father since.”

Our screen had been left open. I stepped up. The wind was stirring the old bamboo-leaf food wrappers scattered on the floor. My father was on his elbows and knees with his bottom in the air, peering at a painting on the floor.

“Old Man?” I said. “Did you have a visitor?”

He did not reply. I saw that his hands were not moving. He was just propped there. I stuck my toe into his side. He did not move.

“Hokusai!”

He toppled over sideways.

Everything went black. I must have called for help: the neighbour sent her children for water while she ran to the apothecary. I held my father’s head in my lap.

I waited for hours for a sound. Then he called for his shochu. He drank the potato liquor and pretended nothing was wrong. He said that he was sleeping, and what was the problem? But I knew who had been there.

T
he orphan son of my sister O-Miyo and Shigenobu had progressed from being a bully to being a gangster. True, he had learned from a master: his father had beaten my sister with his fists while she was making the evening meal. The boy had clung to his mother’s kimono while Shigenobu threw cooking pots at the walls. He had forced O-Miyo to stand outside in the cold while he and his cronies sat around the
kotatsu
drinking. The boy’s name was Shigeshiro. My father mumbled excuses: his parents had divorced.

“So what?” I used to say to him.

And he had come to us before, several times at this address.

My name for him was Monster Boy. Every time he showed up and stamped on our tatami with his dirty sandals, my father greeted him with a face wreathed in smiles and a handful of money. He loved him. Loved him silly. Never stopped.

“Old Man, beloved old father. Hokusai,” I warned, “you are a fool. He is going to throw that money away after we work all day and half the night to earn it. He is the Leech Child.” That was a figure of myth. He was born of deities but had to be cast out because of his actions.

That was the last time Monster Boy came.

“Yes, but you see,” said Hokusai triumphantly, “look what became of the Leech Child. He was transformed. He is worshipped as Ebisu, one of the Seven Lucky Gods.”

“Well, I don’t think this one will be.”

“He is a good boy. You must have patience.”

I put my head in my hands. My father was so stubborn.

“I am going to set him up as a fishmonger.”

“Old Man, you’re dreaming. He won’t do one day of honest work.”

“Ei is a hard woman.” He stared into the air as if speaking to an ancestor. “She hoards my money.”

“You forget that it’s my money too. I mixed the pigment. I painted the bridge and the cherry trees myself. I designed the women.”

But I was not to mention these inconvenient facts.

“The apprentices will do the work if you don’t wish to,” he muttered, shuffling out to make water behind the tenements.

“You forget we have no apprentices at the moment!”

The young man had come back only hours later.

“We have nothing for you,” I said.

“You have nothing, izn it?” he said, addressing my father, whom he found to be more receptive. “You are the famous artist, they say. You get paid a lot of money for these things. Where’z it gone, then?” He drove his toe into a pile of design sketches. I said to myself, Remember fear? How the bullies want us to feel it and we must not? Nothing ever frightened Hokusai but Monster Boy. His fear was caused by his love. This was a weakness in him, this longing to see something good in his grandson. I was not similarly afflicted. I stood over my father.

That day, when Shigeshiro was gone again and Hokusai was sitting by the coal fire, I put a cold cloth on his bruised cheek.

“Oh, he is a good boy under all of that,” he said.

“You never felt that much love for me,” I marvelled. “You old fool.”

Hokusai did not answer for a while. Then he said, “I don’t need to. You’re strong.”

So that was my problem! “You love him because he’s weak?”

“He’s my burden. He’s my curse for all the things I’ve done wrong. He’ll improve; he’ll grow up.”