The Ghost Brush (46 page)

In one final sketch nearly at the end of the book, I had some fun.

Two gardeners, one leaning over his shovel, the other pouring water from his wooden ladle out of his wooden bucket, were planting cherry trees on Nakanocho Boulevard. Their legs were knotted and their buttocks bare with a strip of cloth between them. A young woman leaned out a windowsill above, flirting. Not recommended behaviour.

I completed the commission. The book was printed in large quantities. It was a success. Everyone spoke of its beauty. My name was on it, and my signature. I was almost famous, and we ate well for a time.

35

New Year’s, 1849

SOMETIMES THE OLD MAN
was almost as he had been.

Hokusai got up off his mattress, his blanket in his fist, his eyes big with wonder at yet another day given.

“Greetings on the last day of the year,” he said. “Where is my shochu?”

“You know where your shochu is.”

Not wanting to stop my brush, I jerked my hand towards the jug. He gave me a sidelong, low-lidded look, sticking out his scrawny neck like a turtle, and went to get the ladle. Dipped it, filled it, drank two ladles one after another. His eyes watered, and I could practically see fumes coming up his throat.

“Is there breakfast?”

“I went to the stall and got a pork dumpling,” I said, somewhat grudgingly. “He boiled one just for me.”

“What is that you are doing?”

“Twilight at the green houses,” I said. “The women on display in the latticed verandah. The men looking in.”

He looked at my paper. “Affecting.”

He burped up more fumes, went to the door, slid it open, and looked out. With his bandy legs apart he held on to a buttock cheek with each hand and squeezed. He forced air between his buttocks so that it rattled. And he laughed.

“Perhaps in this new year, I may die.”

This dying talk was an idle threat. Hokusai did not wish to die.

“Death will cut into your drawing time. How is your leg?” I said. He was rubbing the side of his hip. When I asked, he stopped.

“I think I will go up to the mountains again and see Kozan.”

“There you go, making promises you won’t keep,” I joked. But as I said it, I felt sad. He would never go there again. He attributed his weakness to the storm in Obuse, the return of the lightning. “I was paralyzed,” he often said. But this time he could not walk it off. His Chinese herbs and exorcisms, in the form of paintings, had no more effect.

“I tell you, King Emma of Hades has built himself a little house in the country. He wants me to do a little scroll painting for him. Remember, Daughter, when they carry me away, to put my drawing materials with me!”

He looked at me so sharply I knew he was serious.

“I won’t.”

The fierceness left his face and he was immediately joking again.

“I expect I’ll have a nice little place on Inferno Road. Happy to see you if you pass that way!”

“You may go to hell, Old Man,” I said, “but you won’t stay there long. You’ve never stayed anywhere long.”

He came back in and folded himself on the tatami beside me. I braced for the inevitable end-of-year discussion.

“Dear Father, today is the day we dread. The day we try not to imagine. But it has come. It’s time to pay our bills.”

“Why do you bother me about money, Ei?” He gave me a look that said it was all beneath him.

He shifted over onto his knees and elbows. His bottom end was now up in the air. He picked up a brush and pulled a roll of rice paper out from under my stack. I noted with irritation that he was now painting while my brush was idle.

“Unfortunately, those who must pay us are not so numerous.”

“That is likely true,” he mused, almost in spite of himself.

“Perhaps the publisher has money for me from the sales of the Illustrated Manual for Women.”

“When did I make that?”

“You didn’t. I made it.”

“Ah, yes. I recall it. The one that shows the correct way for women to behave on every occasion in life. As if you would know!” He cackled into his chest.

“I didn’t say I made the rules. I only drew the pictures,” I said testily.

“Ah.”

All of a sudden his brush, which had been poised—perfectly, ominously poised—woke up and darted back and forth, circling, spitting, on the surface of his paper in a burst of furious energy.

“And of daily exorcisms? What are we owed for them?”

“But you threw them in the street, don’t you remember?”

T
HINGS WORSENED IN OUR COUNTRY.
Foreigners were circling without, and within the battle between Western-leaning samurai and those who wished to keep us closed accelerated. One of the porters from Juhachi-ya came to our home. He bowed to the floor in the doorway. I had become careless of my appearance; I must have appeared mad. My father’s battle to live or to die had left signs of scuffle in me.

“He speaks only rarely,” I said. I didn’t want other people to hear how badly he slurred and stuttered.

“It’s you I’ve come to see. We’re going back to the mountains. The business is bankrupt. This is our last trip. We will take you if you wish. The gods are against us. Edo will burn again, burn to the ground. There will be robbings and killings. It will not be safe, miss.”

I rolled up eighty-six sketches that I had rescued and hidden after Hokusai threw them out. I had to be secretive because it made him angry. He believed it to be part of the efficacy of the charm to throw them away. Now he believed them sold.

“Take these to Kozan. It is all we have.”

The porter left.

Silence. The brush again: furious, jabbing, delicate, twisting, splayed—then still. I hated to be cross with him. I hated to remind him he was not powerful anymore. We love the arrogance of the strong and hold it dear no matter how it crushes us. I could not bear to see him humbled; I would rather humble myself. I would rather live under his mad regime.

“No more for the festival cart ceilings, then?”

“Last year.”

He lifted a bony buttock cheek and farted again.

“There was the St. Nichiren . . .” he began.

He was right. There was one. He had painted it for the temple. And a strange painting it was. St. Nichiren sat on a cloud and beneath him in rows cringed a hundred balding believers. A dragon’s scaly tail circled under the saint, but he was too busy reading his scroll to notice.

I was excited for a minute. “You’re right. We never saw any pay for that picture.”

“I could not ask. The temple.”

“No.”

“But someone may come.”

“Yes, someone may be sent. Is there any more?”

“Did you sell dolls?”

“When I did I took the money and we spent it on food.”

And that was it: our tally.

“What do we owe?”

“The largest amount to the temple for the rent of this room. The second-largest to the vendor for our food. The third—”

“The third to the drinking house,” he said. “I never go there. You do.”

“I buy your shochu.”

“And are we ahead or behind?”

“We are behind, Father. You must know that.”

He brightened. “We could move on.”

I knew he would say that. I had tried at the time of the last move to make a list of our living places, got to the number ninety-three, and stopped.

“What is this? One hundred views of Edo?” I asked. “One hundred filthy lodgings? No, Old Man. I won’t move again. It is enough. Three times last year! The paintings to pack. Our bedding. The pot and teacups.”

“I don’t know why we have that pot. We never use it.”

True again. I fell silent.

“We like our rented houses, do we not?”

“I don’t.”

He looked mortally wounded.

“You don’t? But it is our way.”

“I’m tired of our way.”

“Then you would stay behind?”

Was he really suggesting he move off by himself? “No, Old Man, of course I wouldn’t.”

“Then good. Let’s go.”

It was an obsession with him. Our houses, like so many sketches for a final work, like so many lotus-leaf food wrappers, used and discarded. Such restlessness! Running from the censors. Running from Monster Boy. Running from the bakufu because we were labelled as lovers of the West. Running from time and age. No more running for me.

I pretended to be lazy. I yawned. “It all seems like such a bother. Why not just stay here?”

A picture was beginning to grow under his brush. He was painting the tiger again. All last year he painted tigers, in rain, in snow. Their paws were soft, their bodies powerful but muted somehow, turned upon themselves, as if they did not know which way to go with all that energy. But his hand shook and his brush fell to the mat.

“If we just owned our little house,” I began. I don’t know why I bothered.

“Chin-Chin!” he cried in frustration. “There are none but rented houses in this world. Why should we try to keep one? Our true home is north, at the North Star. If we kept a home on earth, we would only have to give it back. We rent the house of this body, do we not?”

This was Hokusai in his pious mood.

“If we rent our bodies,” I grumbled, “I have a complaint for the one who gave the lease on this one.”

He laughed. This was the type of joke I was supposed to make, and he was supposed to laugh at it. Yet I really had no complaints of my body. I patted my stomach: rounded. My legs: strong and wiry. I did not sicken. I did not tire. I painted all day and caroused in the teahouses until the small hours of the morning.

“I agree that any home we have on earth is temporary.”

He nodded approvingly.

“But that is not a reason for us to make it more so.”

My father subsided—and this sent a tiny splinter into the wall of my chest. He cocked his head, half-listening, now trying to pick up his brush again. His tiger was prowling in the most wonderful shape, head to the right, tail swooping from right to left, mottled torso forming a diagonal mound between.

“You do it,” he said, reaching out towards me with his brush.

The tiger got a white yap in perfect profile and an open mouth. Hokusai eyed it and jerked his finger. To the brush, then the ink pot, then the centre of its face. I added a black dot for the tiger’s nose.

I had never seen a tiger. We had no tigers in Japan. The creature was one of myth to us. But I knew cats. This tiger was like one of the cats that had followed me since I was a little girl. I made the tiger pace, as a cat would, switching his tail dangerously, roaring in silent, stilled anger as the rain poured on him and softened every hair on his body so it appeared to be velvet.

Hokusai sat up and slurped his tea. His lips were sharp and stretched over the edge of the cup. Such old lips, lined and dry. They could live forever.

“Today,” I said, “instead of moving to a new set of rooms, we will clean these ones.”

“Huh,” he said. “You will. I have the palsy.”

My father grinned, his toothless, wrinkled face lighting with some kind of gladness: he was giving me what I wanted. He swiped his fist out towards me and took the brush from my hand. Conversation closed.

It was my turn to resist. “I don’t know how to sweep.”

“I’ll show you,” said Hokusai.

“Will you? Have you known all this time? You could have taught me.”

“That was for your mother to do.”

“She tried. In the same way she tried to teach me to sew.”

We laughed over that one.

He took a piece of the paper that had wrapped the rice balls I bought for last night’s dinner, dipped his brush in my ink, and began.

First he drew hands on the broomstick. He had never been any good with fingers, and I couldn’t help noticing the thumb was inside out. Then he made a quick set of footsteps, like the instructions for the latest dance. First the feet, then the whole body. A figure appeared with a few strokes. The figure was me, short and spry, knobby of knee and elbow. I turned this way and that, the broom ahead of me, the broom flying, circling, possessed. The dust flew out of invisible corners.

“This is not sweeping,” I protested. “This is drawing.”

“Ah,” said Hokusai, eyes twinkling in the old way, “always the confusion.”

And just by the way, he had done a better—funnier, more lively—illustration of a woman’s activities than I could do. And just by the way, since the moment he yawned his first words, I had not made a single brush stroke on a work of my own. I had only finished his tiger.

There is room for only one brush in a household.

Admittedly, it was late in life for me to discover this.

A
nd then Hokusai doubled over, softly, because his body had almost no weight to it now—it was all light and fire—and fell to the mat. His eyes closed and he was breathing heavily.