The Ghost Brush (82 page)

Edo became a city of “men obsessed with women.” In the licensed pleasure quarters, women were idolized and brutalized, and taxes went straight to the bakufu. And all of this social change gave rise to a great flood of woodcut-printed material—cheap novels, biographies, calendars, and picture prints.

M
agical, papery Edo—with its kinetic folk and divine vistas—is long gone. But it may be one of the most intensively documented places that ever existed. That’s because, like condemned men, the artists saw and remembered everything. They drew construction sites and shopkeepers with their abacuses and actors on their days off. They drew women travelling on public ferries and flying kites. They drew new fabrics and demon festivals. They wrote about unknown people like themselves—a water vendor, for instance.

For the great mass of poor townspeople these books were escape. They borrowed them from the library. Yes, there were rental libraries in Edo—
656
of them, to be exact, in
1806
. The rental agents walked around town with the books in a pack on their back. “It’s strange,” Ellis said. “Collectors are finding that the very best copies of these books have thumbprints with little rolled bits of paper from use at the bottom right and left corners—even rubbing off the frame, the black rectangle that encloses the text. They’re worn, and we have come to think that the publishers sold the earliest printings directly to the lending libraries.”

“What about newspapers? How did people get their news?” Rebecca asked.

“Rumour,” he said. “Gossip.” There were the occasional broadsheets, but almost none survive. “You’ve got to understand,” he said, “that in their minds, they had no right to news.”

All books, even silly books, erotic books, were subversive: they made things known that the bakufu wanted to keep secret. Even the laws were unknown. You could break them, be punished, die for your crime. But you might not know exactly what you’d done. The law was secret. It was a backward world, an Alice in Wonderland world. But it worked. The Tokugawa stayed in control for
250
years.

Under the thumb of these micromanaging rules, the Edoites developed a preoccupation with lists. There were lists of the ten best tofu places in Edo. There were lists of the fantastic, of thin people, of fat people, of famous lovers, of famous eccentrics. “Multiple bits of information,” Ellis called them. It’s no coincidence that we had Hokusai’s Thirty-six Views of Mt. Fuji (actually forty-six) and One Hundred Poems Told by the Nurse, and Hiroshige’s Fifty-three Stages of the Tokaido.

The multiple bits had no narrative. The lists gave a picture made in dots, without connectives. The connectives would have been the story. But Edoites were not allowed to know the story, or to enunciate it. This act of listing was naming without knowing. If you were a subject of all the action, you could only list the parts, without order, without explanation, without direction. To give the narrative would be to assume control.

S
till, the rules were subverted.

Dr. Ellis talked about poetry circles: anyone could join. All-night parties where fishmongers mingled with samurai—although this was officially forbidden. The samurai, high in the class system, who had no money, and the fishmonger, low, who was so rich that he was commissioning paintings for the inside of his jacket, sat down together. Even women, who had virtually no freedom, could attend.

Ellis always said “even” when he said “women.”

Earlier, in medieval Japan, noblewomen and some nuns had independence. And women’s positions improved when the Americans came, after
1860
. But it was terrible in the time of the floating world. So “even women.” Some books were written so even women could read them, in a special, limited cursive script.

Ellis put a copy in Rebecca’s hands. The text was carved into the blocks wherever it would fit around straddling actors, beautiful women, mountains and willows. It was a slim but very full book—teeming, actually; there wasn’t a quarter inch of space without word or picture. She held it open.

Down at the bottom outside corners of both pages were the thumbprints Ellis had mentioned of those long-gone library users who couldn’t afford to buy the book. There was no signature on this very old, soft book. But in the introduction the writer, Old Kyoden, called himself by name and apologized for his silly story. It was all he could think of when the publisher came knocking.

This was an Edo thing. The nod and wink, the nudge. Nobody stayed in role.

The world was curved and gentle—oarsmen’s arabesques, ladies’ kimono, umbrellas in the snow. The only straight lines in the whole business composed the frame, a strict black line that went around the edges of each page and down the join in the middle to keep the excitement inside.

But the frame did not hold. A sandalled foot stepped over it. A delicate wrist was draped or fingers curled over the edge. A blossom opened beyond it, and then a sword hilt severed it.

Rape and revenge and death by passion almost fit the page. But not quite. Here and there, figures overpowered lines. The trapped and boundlessly energetic citizens of Edo. The artists let them out, freeing them, painting over the lines to show that passions were stronger than any simple border, any black barrier.

T
he students eavesdropped on Edo. They sat opposite one another at a long banquet-style table and looked at a huge map of the city, its shops, boats, and bridges. They peered into the people’s modest households, catching them rolling back on the floor with sex. Rebecca was looking for someone particular, of course. She was looking for the girl called Ei, who later took the brush name of Oei.

They saw the graceful curves of everything from boatmen’s postures to women’s clothing, to the drapings of mosquito netting, to figures having gentle and sometimes forced sex, kimono falling open. They saw the actor Danjuro VII appearing at the back of the theatre, arms lengthened by bamboo sticks, red warpaint on his cheeks, shouting, “Shiba dacku! Wait a minute!”

She wondered about Hokusai, how he straddled two centuries. Why did one man seem to live forever?

For that matter, why did one book and not another? Ellis produced a tiny, soft volume. A pamphlet. It was the cheapest of cheap productions: it had no cover and cost only a few mon. It was a theatre program from
1816
, an ehon bunziki.

It was bag-bound—sewn simply along the edge—and made of soft, thick grey paper, like a layer you might pull off the abandoned nest of paper wasps. It felt like a living thing, or better, like one that has very recently died, with that sadness about it.

How strange that it came there when so many of the more serious, more expensive productions were burned or lost, eaten by worms, or crushed under tons of rock in earthquakes. Probably because it was so cheap, and so slight, it slipped through.

“They give way, and they survive,” said Ellis.

The pages were crammed with images and cursive script. The pictures showed actors onstage—sitting, crowding, fighting. They were being rehearsed by a man with a long script tumbling over his hands and down along the floor. This little book bore the red, pear-shaped seal of the artist Shikitei Sanba.

His name came abruptly into the chill, white rooms. Shikitei Sanba! Ellis explained that he was a theatre critic, and that everyone from actors to restaurant owners had curried favour with him. He had the gift; he was glib and charming and saw opportunities. Of course his little book would show up—he was the one who wrote, “It is often in the things of little value that the greatest profit is to be found.”

Why Sanba? Existing after all these years? Should we credit his longevity pills?

Then Ellis produced a print of the Nakamura theatre lobby. In this print a man sat quietly on a bench facing away from us, his arms wide along the backrest. We saw the back of his head and the nape of his neck, a vulnerable place. We could see over his shoulders into the open space over the stage, but we could not see what he was seeing.

I
F I HAD BEEN A BREATHING THING,
I would have stopped. If I had not already been cold, I would have gone chill.

It was him, of course. If I had known how to cry, I’d have shed a tear.

He had put himself in his picture. He didn’t look us in the eye, but he was there. In Sanba’s theatre all was quiet: gone were the slurping and cracking of teeth on nuts, the shuffling, the grumbling, the stage whispers, the sound of the wooden clappers.

I knew what he was thinking. He was thinking about me. He was thinking that I was finally old enough.

“There it is again,” said Ellis, pointing at the picture. The nudge and the wink. In the same way Utamaro painted himself into the morning brothel while the teenage apprentices brought in splashing pails of water for washing and the courtesans put on the teakettle. “These artists put themselves in their work this way. They seem to wait patiently for the world to discover them,” said Ellis. “It is as if they knew we would find them, one day.”

19

The Blind Man

THE CITY WAS FULL OF BODIES
. Not only thrashed corpses and pickled heads, but quick bodies, wily and always in motion. The tattooed firemen raised their ladders showing cleaved buttocks and stout necks. Courtesans sat in windows with their kimono sitting wide over pale, round shoulders. The standing legs of throngs in the temple markets were like thickets of bamboo. If you paused going over a bridge, a dozen arms pushed you forward from behind.

Bodies were the spokes in the wheels that made the city roll. One day I’d watch a pack of girls learning a new dance. The next I’d catch acrobats in front of the theatre somersaulting to bring in the crowds. Boys flew kites in the riverbed and even the courtesans got out to play on festival days, batting at shuttlecocks. These bodies were my father’s subjects. His brush was alive with them. Skeletal old men, tubby children, winsome girls, monks in prayer—whatever moved attracted his eye, and the movement went straight from his eye to his brush to the paper.

Carpenters and bricklayers heaved up their loads in the streets, adding storeys to our cramped buildings. The old ways cramped us too. We could not be contained. Even scarred Shino in her verandah with its wooden pickets would rise again. She would have a blind moneylender for her lover.

I saw how life was punishing and how bodies took the brunt of it. At the fishmarket I watched an exhausted old man drag his lame leg, dodging the brown, healthy young ones as they tossed a giant tuna back and forth. His wife tidied the shellfish on their cart: she was smaller than me, but her hands—scarred from the shell edges, gnarled and swollen-knuckled—were brilliant, arranging frilled shells in exact lines. Those wrinkled fingers flashed; they darted like swallows, showing their ugliness only when still.

Women’s bodies swelled like fresh fruit and withered just as fast. In the public bath I watched covertly as the married ones took off their clothes. After the evenness of youth, female bodies gave away to folds of flesh, rolls in the thighs, scrawny ribs. Yet each woman was proprietary, scrubbing off her dead skin, patting her pink, moist folds.

If he had nothing else, a man had his own body. A woman too had her body. At least until she took an adult shape. Then, most likely, a man wanted it. If he took it, he gave it back worn and used. I watched these things and, perhaps without knowing, decided that I would be the kind of woman men did not want.

M
y own body was dressed again in girls’ clothes. I was fourteen and ugly. So everyone said. My jawbone was wide, breaking my face out in a diamond shape. My chin protruded with a round knob. They called me lantern-face. I worked in the North Star Studio. I was the errand girl for Hokusai.

The day I remember, I had gone with him to the bookseller’s stall. I rested at the side of the street. I did this as often as I could. If there was dust, I drew in it with my toe. If there was mud, I used a stick to make my lines. If there was paper and a brush and ink, I made sketches from life, just as he did. This day I wandered off and hung around the fruit seller with her trays of watermelon until she gave me a piece. I slurped it down, and the thin, red juice drooled down my cheeks; I spit the black seeds up into the air. Shino would have been scandalized by my manners.

I stood for a while in the crowd gathering in front of a man who sold perfumes. “Almond blossom,” he shouted. “Almond blossom.” The sweet, delicate smell was lost in the charcoal fumes from the yakitori stand and the sweat that rose up amongst the bodies. Then I went back to listen.

My father was showing Tsutaya his new work. He’d made a design of a boat harlot, slumped in a corner and wrapped in a black headscarf. It was meant for an album of Edo courtesans. These were the lowest of the low; they worked in the cold, damp anonymity of the canals. The blacks and reds were deep, saturated on the paper.

“I don’t think so,” pouted the publisher. “It’s so dark. Anyway, we don’t need more courtesans. It’s more difficult every day to get these things by the censors.”

That annoyed me. The truth was I’d painted in the colours myself, after Hokusai made the outline.