The Ghost Brush (37 page)
Hokusai laughed. It was this laughter that had confused me when I was a child. He had compassion, but he was ruthless. He had no feeling for the dead but a great deal for the dying. The dead were completed. Only the dying were in pain. And the living.
I wept for the loss of my window on the world.
He made that gesture with his shoulders, bringing them up to his ears. It was comical. Defiance gave him energy. He was suddenly himself. He staggered and stuttered no more. He put his elbow in my ribs.
“The spirit of protest is in you, Chin-Chin. I breathed it into you. That is why you look so funny.”
Tears ran down my cheeks. He shook me by the elbow. He peered into my eyes.
“What have you done? Did you fall in love with another man you cannot have?”
I began walking furiously.
W
e were on the Tokaido heading for the sea at Uraga. The Old Man did not hurry and he did not slow. He did not tire and he did not stop. Perhaps he leaned on that long stick of his, perhaps he pushed himself forward with it, but he maintained an excellent pace. At the top of the hill he turned around and walked backwards, fixing the city in his gaze. I sped up and passed him. When we came to the checkpoint he performed a perfect imitation of himself in his palsied state, staggering and slurring. I held him upright and became invisible, one of the nameless women who helped the aged. The guards waved us through. We walked until the city was nothing but a soiled spot in the distance.
I protested our leaving. “We won’t hear what happens to him.”
“Yes, we will,” said Hokusai. “I’ll return by night and hear the gossip.”
M
ONTHS LATER THE MIRACLE DOCTOR
was judged and found innocent of spying. His crimes were committed “in an excess of scientific zeal.” Takahashi, known as Globius, died in prison before the sentence of death could be brought on him, and his son was banished. Genseki the court physician was removed from his post, and his son was punished.
Von Siebold was extremely lucky: he was merely expelled. He left Edo in disgrace and was ordered never to return. I could not explain this clemency to the barbarian when the Japanese were so terribly punished, but perhaps the truth was what von Siebold had always said—that the laws did not apply to him.
Rumour said that back at Deshima, the doctor had searched the walls for the maps he had hidden there, only to discover that rats had eaten his cache. Incredibly, the crates of Japanese objects that had been seized in Nagasaki were restored to him. But—I asked my father—what about my paintings? Where were they?
“You must dream the answer to that,” Hokusai said to me. “Otherwise we will never know.”
I tried to dream, but I wanted less than the knowledge of my paintings’ fate to see my tall, golden man again, he who spoke to me of Shakespeare and women’s lives. Maybe my false pretenses were the reason why the dreams did not come.
I tried calling the paintings. What has become of you, promenading courtesan? Samurai horses? Some of you were seized, I know, because the picture of the castle walls was in the hands of the guards. Were you returned to the doctor, as the gossip said? And now where are you? Decorating the Shogun’s inner chambers? In the belly of the great sailing ship returning to Europe?
In the fire?
But my inner eye remained closed.
In the depths of December, the Miracle Doctor sailed away from Nagasaki on the frigate Jawa, bound for Batavia. His wife and daughter came out in a small fishing boat to watch. They said that he carried their portraits bound into his shirt next to his chest, and that as the sails filled with wind, the Miracle Doctor hung over the rails and wept.
I wept too.
Dark Days
MY FATHER STAYED IN URAGA
and I returned to Edo. He was perhaps in danger, and we spoke of it as if he were in exile. But I think he wanted to see the ocean, and Mt. Fuji. He was ready to start the series he’d planned of the sacred mountain. I had to take such work as was available—nothing much.
The first thing I did was move back into our old quarter of Asakusa. There, I was not lonely. I could resume teaching some of my old students. I took my tea and rice and small grilled fish on the street. Breakfast, enjoyed before nerves interfered with my digestion, was my favourite meal. Sometimes I had a “dancing unagi,” an eel grilled and then fried so it wrinkled. It was crunchy outside but, once the crust was gone, smooth and sweet on the tongue.
Delicious. I sucked each finger and let it go with a pop. I said good morning to the candy seller, who was my father’s friend. I got back home just as the students were arriving.
Mune was still with me, and although she did not have the talent her mother had, she was a good painter. She had directed her friends towards me. I set them to work, sketching, copying, designing. I moved amongst them on my knees, edging the cats off the papers, telling them to be exact, making them repeat and repeat. We smiled together.
“You will learn to move the brush through the air without thinking, as a swallow moves its wings.”
One of them would bring me lunch from the stalls—eggplant, if I was lucky. But it was expensive and I always demurred unless they insisted.
Sometimes pictures flew into my head. But a student would look up with a question. I tried to save the idea in my mind’s eye. But the next day would be the same: no time to put my pictures on paper, full of teaching and commissions (thankfully, commissions).
The times were difficult, of course. Hokusai’s old apprentices began to show up, looking for work—Hokuri, Hokuryo, and Hokusen. Even the pupils of pupils made their way to see me some days—Kakusen, who was a pupil of Hokumei’s, and Keiri, who had studied with Hokkei. But I was on my own and strangely content. I did a series called Lives of Flourishing Women, thinking, for once, that I too was flourishing. Some people compared it to my father’s work and said Hokusai was getting old. But he wasn’t getting old; he was growing younger.
He crept into the city now and then on moonless nights, arriving by boat at the fishing piers at the mouth of the Sumida. From there, wearing a bumpkin’s hat and leaning on the bo, he mingled with the crowds heading north on the riverbanks. He kept his head down, He chanted constantly to keep his palsy at bay. “Atanda, atanda, atanda-bate.”
In the alley the neighbour women might be sitting on the edge of one of the houses, keeping out of the way of their drunken husbands. They were not fooled by the hat. “Hey, hey, Old Man,” they would said. “Old Man coming!”
He really was Iitsu now: “one again.” “You are blessed to have such a father,” said the candy seller, awestruck by Hokusai’s great age of seventy years. He had left so many lives behind him. He had begun his magnificent series of views of Mt. Fuji. The cost of beru had dropped, so we could afford to have prints made in it. I thought of the blue eyes of my lost Dutch doctor every time we did.
I
T WAS AN EARLY WINTER TWILIGHT
. My students folded up their bundles and chimed their goodbyes. Mune was the last. She touched my hand affectionately. “You’ll be all right?” were always her final words.
I pressed more charcoal into the kotatsu and settled under the blanket. I asked the boy next door to bring me tea. I now had a few hours to paint for myself. But someone coughed discreetly at my door.
“Who’s there?” I threw my best low, masculine voice across the room.
“Eisen, come to see you.” I heard his laughter. He was not fooled by my manly tones.
“Strange hour to visit,” I said ungraciously, sliding the screen open.
Eisen’s samurai background assured that he had lovely manners if he was sober, and impeccable manners if he was drunk. We both understood why, years before, he had left the North Star Studio, choosing to learn elsewhere. He was restless and talented. Hokusai had kept him down too long, and Eisen sprang up in the world once he left us. I supposed he had merely come to give me his news. These days he was successful. He too used beru—in fact, he had used it first. We spoke about the sudden drop in its price: now everyone would be using it. We chatted awhile, and as I did not offer him anything, he bowed himself out.
But not long after, in the late afternoon, Eisen appeared again at the studio door. In that hour we were all women, cleaning our brushes amid chirps of tired conversation. He looked around and took the mood of the place. “What are you hiding here?” he said, and, “Your cherry tree is ravishing.” He picked up a cat and massaged it behind the ears in a way I took note of. “I am despondent. What are we men to do when the women refine their skills to such an extreme?” He stirred up the younger female students, flirting with even the plainest and shyest girl, who could not raise her eyes from the floor. Mune, confident in her role as lead student, played along. “If you are asking for advice, you might drink a little less and work a little more.”
He inclined his large and shield-shaped head in her direction. I found myself charmed. His rough edge disguised polish within, just the opposite of most people those days. “Ah, I thank you for your kind observation,” he said. “I am going to seed, it is quite true. I have decided, however, to put up no fight and to watch with detached curiosity as life’s temptations get the best of me.”
Titter, titter, went the ladies.
He helped me chase them out into the smoky decline of day, as if he thought one or another of them might take advantage of me. As I rolled up the papers he said, “Shall we go out for a little drink?”
I spoke more crossly than I intended. “You don’t need any more, if you don’t mind my saying so.”
He saw that I was not amused. He apologized profusely and left. There! I thought. I have got rid of a pest.
But I looked for him the next day. When I heard his soft cough at the shoji, I opened the screen rather quickly, which action was not lost on him. He tried to hide his small smile.
If I was not mistaken, that look of pleasure was gladness in seeing me. He was a little disreputable, with greying hair, noble, thick brows cutting straight across and a hawk-like nose. His deep, resonant voice was clogged with smoke. He apologized for the day before.
“You mentioned, Oei-san, that I did not need any more drink. I have no wish to argue with a lady so assured. And I hope you will excuse my saying so, but I very much do. It is precisely when a man has had a lot that he has need of more. Don’t you agree?”
He never used five words when fifty would do. How could I resist? And why should I anyway?
We sat in a teahouse and drank cup after cup of sake. I knew that my large ears burned red. I knew that my laugh—“ak, ak, ak, ak”—sometimes ending in a little explosion of smoke from my pipe, was not feminine. But I forgot how very unattractive these traits were. We talked about who was painting what, my father’s Fuji series, which new prints we liked and which we didn’t. He returned me to my door by moonlight and went off.
The next day I wandered into a bookshop to look at Eisen’s work. I found his print of Hana-ogi VIII, the most recent incarnation of the great courtesan. She had a shovel-shaped face which was very much like his own. She looked haggard, dogged, and beautiful. I studied it with admiration. How did he do it? There was much said in the plain white space he’d left for her features, and much in her hectic clothing. He had far more feeling than his clever chat let on.
I picked up a directory he’d written of floating world artists and was astonished that he spoke of me: “Ei, the daughter, works under her father. She is an excellent painter.”
Not many men would have said that.
The next time he came I offered him tea and called the boy next door to get it. He looked around at the little burner. “Are you cooking something?” he said hopefully.
I thought I should put him straight. “Pigment is the only thing I ever put on a burner,” I said.
“Let’s talk about your pigments, then,” he said. “How do you prepare them? You take such care.”
“It’s my job.”
It had been just a task when I first worked for my father, but now I was an expert and the process gave me pleasure. My colours were deep and clear, the envy of other artists. I had my own technique to get the paint thick and the colours dense. It was not a recipe I shared. I simmered the mixtures of lead and seeds as I was doing now. I added secret ingredients and then took a further step that no one knew of.
“Apprentices could do that.”
“Hokusai likes it better when I do.”
“I bet he does.”
Another night he said, “Why don’t you sign your Beauties?”
Maybe he was trying to stir up trouble. But I chose to believe he was only curious. “Why should I?”
“If you did, you might find out that you have quite a different style from your father.”
“That is the question, isn’t it?” My father worked in a thousand styles. “My colours are my signature.”
“Why should your father take the credit for them?”
“Because he is Hokusai. He is Iitsu, at the moment.”
“And you are Oei.”
“I am his daughter. Helping him is my duty.”