The Ghost Brush (38 page)

“Duty!” he scoffed.

That word belonged to the other side, the neo-Confucians with their old, repressive ways. We both saw the bankruptcy of that world. I admit I felt sheepish invoking it. Yet the new ways that we artists touted might change a great deal, but they did not erase the family.

“Maybe he takes you for granted.”

“So he should. Unlike others”—a little dig there—“I would never leave him.”

“You left your husband.”

“That was different.”

“Why?”

A pointless question. I shrugged. “A husband is dispensable if he is not loved,” I said.

“Not many women would say that.”

“Not many women would have the choice.”

He laughed.

I continued. “A husband can be left, but a father cannot. He is always attached. And my father perhaps more than some. He made me an artist. He loved me despite my unbeautiful face and ‘manly’ nature.” Of course, so did Tomei, but somehow that didn’t count.

“Was Tomei not good to you too?”

“He was,” I said. I knew it was unfair. “I have no answer.”

“I’m glad you said that. Love is mysterious and there should not be answers.”

By then we were tucked under the kotatsu, with its mixed cold drafts and hot spots, his head one way and mine the other. My fingers were curled around a teacup and his around a sake bottle. When he mentioned love I thought of the Dutch doctor. I thought of how my father had told me I always loved men who were taken. Was Eisen taken? I believed so. He had a wife. His hand was straying inside the collar of my kimono. It was not the least hesitant, making bold incursions inside my wrappings.

“If the two of you, Oei and Hokusai, were married, it would be different. You could be his silent partner. But you are not married! You are grown up, an adult. You should have your own name. You could be famous.”

“What a ridiculous thought!”

“You are a better painter than he is.”

I knew I was a better painter. Technically. More patient. More precise. Hokusai knew that too. But that didn’t mean I was a great painter.

“Painting is not all of it,” I said, pulling myself up to sitting. “He can draw and perform, and he imagines strange things . . .”

“Yes,” said Eisen, “he is Hokusai and you are not. But you are Oei and he is not. You understand women, you can portray humanity, you have a finer line, and you cook excellent pigment!”

I nervously retied my obi. I thought of the examination the Dutch doctor had put me under: he’d said that Japanese women became powerless in the realm of the emotions. That was my realm. I knew what it looked like: deep red, blue you could drown in, the green of thick forests. I even knew what it felt like. Or I had known, years ago. Maybe I had forgotten. I was the painter of intensity, not a native of that world. Was I too powerless in that realm?

Eisen reached for his sake. “You are so unconventional in some ways, and then you are so conventional,” he grumbled.

I took my pigment off the heat. It would now go underground for sixty days—the secret I was not telling him.

I
T WAS A FEW WEEKS before I saw him again
.

As the last of the students left, I pulled my winter wrap around me and stepped out the door. The air was chill; there was the smell of charcoal burning, and whiteness everywhere. The lanterns winked like fireflies all along the street. Suddenly he was there.

We took a ferry up from Yanagibashi to the Yoshiwara gate. The water was inky and the passengers silent. We walked side by side over the arc of the bridge and through the Great Gate into the pleasure quarter; our clogs beat on the hollow structure. I hadn’t been down the boulevard for a long time.

Ahead of us were the dark, shuttered sides of the little wooden houses. It was quiet. I had never before seen signs in front of the lower-class brothels: “Discounts Offered for Special Services.” We passed Mitsu’s shop. She had become a doom crier.

“You, you come here! I want to talk to you,” she said from her doorway. “Do you know?” she whispered melodramatically, her eyes huge, her lips stretched. “The end is coming!” She peered. “Do I know you?”

“It is Oei,” I said.

“Ei! My child. Remember the golden days of the Yoshiwara? Long ago, the streets were beautiful. And people came here to spend their money. Now the bakufu are going to shut us down.”

She was an old lady now. But in the lamplight she was just as she had been when I was a child. She must have had cataracts. Her eyes glowed strangely. Her skin was very white.

“Who is it with you? Is it your father?” she said, and then I knew she couldn’t see.

“No. It is Eisen, the painter.”

“Ah!” she withdrew into the darkness of her little shop. “Take care of the Old Man. The Old Man is in trouble. I knew he would be one day.”

“The Old Man is far away, safe, in the countryside.”

T
he doors were shuttered: people hurried in the gloom. Year by year the Yoshiwara was losing its allure. The great brothels were declining; there was competition from illegal houses in Shinagawa and other parts of town. It was no longer considered chic to spend all your money on a desperate love affair with a courtesan.

There was still, in the teashop, a display of bedding meant to tempt the yobbos—sumptuous red silk futons and sky blue sheets embroidered with rivers of gold thread—but it was covered in dust. We sat in the back, near the fire. Beside us was a courtesan begging her lover not to forsake her. She was watched by a patient young attendant. She was not young, but not old—probably my age.

She was elaborately decked out, her hair high, greased and punctured with lethal hairpins. Her face was heavily painted white, and her feet shone a chalky white too in the dark teashop. Her toenails were reddened with fruit juice. She shrugged her kimono back, and I could see a name carved in her shoulder. She had made her own tattoo this way, filling the wound with black ink.

It was the name of the man who was leaving.

Large tears stood on her pasty cheeks. Courtesans were famous for their tricks to make themselves cry “for love.” They pulled out eyelashes and sniffed alum. But this one was sincere. He was probably her last hope.

But he thrust her away and stood up. Before he had gone three steps, the courtesan had given up on him. She buried her head in her hands. The lamplight fell on the gouged-out characters of her lover’s name above her collarbone.

Her attendant extended a finger to touch the black scar. “You’re gonna hafta change it now,” she piped.

“Yeah, yeah,” said the woman, rubbing it absent-mindedly. “I’ll burn it with moxa and, once it heals, start over . . .”

And I thought, Here, I agree with the bakufu. The pleasure district is immoral. But not for the reasons they cited—that simple people enjoyed luxuries and forgot their woes. What was immoral was the suffering of the courtesans. Eisen read my mind.

“The doors of the Corner Tamaya are solid gold, but inside are plagues of flower and willow diseases. When the courtesans are sick, the owners put them in a chicken coop,” Eisen said.

Eisen himself ran a brothel for a time, but it burnt down and he was not sorry: it was more than he could stomach, he told me. Anyway, he could not compete with the unprincipled ones.

“The brothel owners go out to sumo matches and the theatre. While they’re gone the managers let in thieves and murderers, whoever can pay.”

His eyes glittered. His hands were near mine on the table.

I said, “It is difficult to remain a decent person in these times.”

“Interesting point,” he said. “Would I have been more honourable if honour were easy to achieve? Would it still be honour?”

I laughed. “The difficulty is knowing the definition.”

“I’m sure you are right and there’s no hope for me,” he said, raising his glass.

Candour was his appeal. He was close to the muck and the mire; he felt its lure, and its horrors too. Despite it all, he still liked to paint Beauties. We shared that.

“Here’s to the great art you would make,” he said, raising his sake cup, “if you were not held captive under your father’s thumb.”

He reminded me of Sanba. Was this the way to my heart, then? Through the traitors’ gate that hated my subservient position to the Old Man? We talked until the clients came out the brothel doors and headed for the gate. Then we followed. The lamps were like stepping-stones in a garden of black. I looked for stars, but they were invisible that night, from that place. I ground my teeth at his word for me—“powerless.” It made me think of my mother.

“I am not powerless. I refuse to be powerless,” I said.

He gallantly took my arm. “Ago-Ago,” he said with a laugh.

There it was again: Chin-Chin. My big chin. My self-will. My father’s teasing, which now came from Eisen’s mouth as fellow feeling.

Arm in arm we walked through the Great Gate, over the bridge, and up the zigzag path on Primping Hill. Our four feet clattered together, companionable. It was something new. Always I walked alone, or behind my father. Eisen coddled my elbow, and my thoughts drifted to Tomei, my ex-husband. They drifted to the woman, whoever she was, who was married to Eisen.

We came to the docks. A boatman stood by. His small, roofed wooden craft nudged the pier.

“Here,” said Eisen, pulling coins from his purse. “We’ll take her out for a paddle.”

I sat under the canopy and drew my cloak around me while Eisen pushed us out with the oar. We glided. The water was still and reflected the low, snow-filled clouds. He pushed us beyond the noisy restaurant boats with their gaudy lamps and past the scattered working boats that came and went all night long. We reached the centre of the river, where a wide swath of water moved quickly and smelled of the deep. Wet snow drifted in thin lines and then sank.

It was colder there. Eisen put down the oar with the exaggerated care of a man who knew he was impaired. He stood and the boat rocked. I giggled. He made his way back, tucked his kimono under himself, sat beside me and pulled me into the warmth of his body.

What happened next I will not describe to you. Modesty strikes. Modesty! Me? You might laugh. But I was not in charge. It was as if a spirit—slow, earthy, and amused—took hold of my blood and my bones from within. This was new. I was cold, but I was melting, deep red. Eisen braced himself to balance me, but not soon enough. We fell to the floor of the boat.

This in itself was ridiculous, not to mention painful. We coughed a little and spoke to each other in broken, courteous phrases, like strangers who had been riding in this conveyance and were forced on top of each other by an earthquake. We were restrained. We tested each other. Then we both gave up the act.

We became rapacious—grasping and utterly selfish. I had known nothing like it. It went on—for how long I have no idea—and then it was over. I was dazed and very cold with melted snow and splash. Eisen too seemed shaken by the violent sequence. We both came back to ourselves slowly. The boat was rocking. The lamp at the prow was flickering. For anyone watching, it was a clear announcement. We laughed.

Eisen got to his feet, retying his kimono with dignity. I sat up and retied my obi. Another boat had drifted near. I could just make out two dark, urgent figures.

Eisen sat looking away from me at the water with the oar in his hand. The clouds had moved off. I could see stars buried deep in the river. We had drifted away from our boatman on shore. Eisen cursed. It would take a bit of rowing to get us back to the dock. I didn’t mind. I shook out my clothes and tied the warmest, driest parts to me. Then I sat and waited as he pulled against the current to get us back to dry land.

W
ITH MY FATHER ABSENT
I controlled our money. I counted it out carefully when I paid the vendors, unlike Hokusai, who tossed money at people’s feet because he felt it was beneath him to deal in it. Then, no fan of consistency, he would do the opposite and beg for it. I saved what we were paid and hid it with his seal in the tangerine box behind the statue of St. Nichiren. I kept us alive; I did the commissions he found dull. Yet Hokusai hated me to manage us: he changed everything when he returned after months of absence.

It was two days before the new year. He came in steaming from Uraga, full of fresh, cold air. I was cramped from sitting so long. I jumped up to greet him. One leg was all pins and needles and buckled under me. I stumbled.

He laughed. “Oh, clumsy one! Oh, daughter mine, you don’t change!” he said.

Perhaps Eisen had spoiled me. He always said it was a pleasure to set eyes on me.

“I am sorry,” I said, in a not-so-sorry voice.

“Now don’t be sad! I’ve come to be with you for New Year’s. We will all be one year older. I will be seventy!”

And I would be thirty.

“We have our visits to make. And the monies to collect.”

“And bills to pay.”

“We must have money from the publisher. Thirty-six Views is so popular!”

He was very pleased with himself. And he looked healthy. A second youth was on him. I wished to be happy, but I simmered with resentment. Was he to have two lives and I none? He sat and called for tea, for sweets. He loved sweets. I didn’t keep them in the house when I was alone. I preferred salty things. I sent a student out to get some.