The Printmaker's Daughter (20 page)

So they had spoken of it. Yes, marry the blind man, he must have said. Here is your lucky chance. A new life any broken-down prostitute would be grateful for. Was that what she was? The elegant, fierce, always patient Shino?

I hated Hokusai then. Why had I been given to him? To him and his lover, who did not even really belong to him? Why didn’t my mother want me? I didn’t want her either, that was true—but hadn’t her rejection come first? My father chose me to help in his studio. Did he ever love me? Or did he just need me? Nothing really lasted with Hokusai. Everything was shed, everything changed; he moved past. It all went in the service of his great passion, this making of pictures, this making of fame. His brush he jealously guarded. And mine too: I could already see him laying his hand on my work. It was my duty as a girl to help him; it was our duty as a family to uphold this man’s little kingdom. Which he mismanaged.

Here was one thing I had in common with my sisters, then: we were broken by his ambition and tied to his work. I must try to love them, I thought. Was there no escape for us but to marry another of these men who eat people’s lives?

I drew a series of round, fat stomachs of men and the ripples of flesh over their ribs—one of my father’s specialties. “The best mother in the Yoshiwara,” they called him. He reached his brush over the edge of his desk down to my level and corrected a line. I wanted to cry. I remembered Shino’s instructions and tried to arrange my face in a pleasing manner. I was never successful. Still less today. I thought, not for the first time and not for the last, if I have to be different, then I will be different. Not like my sisters—willing to marry. And not like my mother, bleating about how it was impossible for her to get what she wanted. That went without saying. Now I thought, not like my father either. He was a bad father and a bad lover.

Shino and the blind man would marry. If no other way was found. It couldn’t be helped. But not me. I saw what came for women, and it was not going to come for me. I could avoid it; I could be an artist. As for the love of a man for a woman, in my parents’ marriage it had brought suffering. That was obvious. But with Shino there had been devotion and a measure of joy: I had seen it. It was not legal, and it was not to be bought and paid for, but it existed along the canals and in the dark corners of the teahouses, under the lacquer trees—it was an outside love, an outlaw thing. I would be loyal to that. I believed in it, even if they didn’t.

Crazy, I suppose.

I looked at the line he had put with his brush on my paper.

Much better than my own.

I studied it. My father could still give me something precious. He could teach me to paint. To learn from him, I did not have to believe he was a good man or a fair man. I had talent, I had often been told. I would feed it, and then perhaps I could escape.

Part III

16.

Sanba

S
HIKITEI SANBA CAME
to the North Star Studio.

I was near the door as usual, the gorgon at the gate. Hokusai waved his hands among the students, intense, comical bald head gleaming in the lamps that lit the dim space. We had moved by then to rooms near Ryogoku. A huge fire had ravaged miles and miles of Shitamachi terrace houses the year before. Our tenement went up in flames, and many pictures went with it. But new shanties, papered with the wrapping from sake barrels because wood was in short supply, grew like mushrooms. They had the advantage of being clean, at least when we moved in. Now a student lived with us. Our pots of paint, our menagerie of restless caged animals about to be drawn, our stacks of paper covered the floor. Cats, made homeless by the fire, circled outside. I tossed our food wrappers their way, and they licked up anything with the smell of fish.

Sanba bowed low to speak to me. Could he come in?

He was that man who spoke to me at the poetry parties. Parodist, drama critic, and seller of face cream.

“Have you come to sign up for painting lessons? Or to see my father’s work?”

“Perhaps I have come to see you.”

“I doubt that.”

“Can you show me some paintings?” he said, bowing again. “What is your name again?”

“My name is O-ooo-ei.” I made the sound that meant “Hey, you!” I had begun to prefer it to my real name. Its street sound matched my raspy voice.

I sounded like a frog in a stagnant pond, my father said. It was part of my general unattractiveness. Did someone once put a hand around my throat and try to squeeze the life out of me? I don’t remember. Shino had tried to teach me to sing and, in singing, to let go of the screams that I never let out, she said. She coaxed my natural voice to emerge. Not much better. It was low and brown, like the chestnut paste the confectioner squeezes out of his paper cones to make little pancakes. At least I would never sing along with the high-pitched women in their baby tones.

But Shino was not in my life now. I had not seen her since the day she took me to the bath.

And here was Sanba, leaning over me.

“What is it you are working on so furiously?” he said.

“At the moment, I am writing accounts,” I said.

My father was teaching me to read and write the way men did. Women learned a less complicated set of characters because they had such limited free time. It took years to acquire the educated script. I liked it; it was convenient for him that I did because that way I could keep track of what we were owed and, more often, what we owed.

It was fun learning the characters. We had games to speed us along. Two sailboats made the number five, and pine trees made the character for “jewel.” Each line of the numbers two, three, four, six, and seven was part of a drawing. A mouse sitting on a jewel for the god of plenty, and flying bats. Nothing was wasted. I learned the character for “mirror maker” by tracing my father’s drawing of a chubby, cheerful fellow whose rounded head and shoulders and thighs made a triangle as he sat on the floor with his wire brush, rubbing the surface to make it reflect. Hokusai had told me how, when he was apprenticed to a mirror polisher, he could never look the ladies and lords in the face. So he peered into the mirrors and saw them over his shoulder, and they never knew he was staring at them.

“I am very sorry to disturb you then, Ooooei. O-oei? That is not a name,” said Sanba. “That is a call. Like a bird call.”

“It is what my father calls me,” I said. “It is easiest.”

“And when he calls, do you come?” said Sanba. I think he must have seen the evil humor lurking under my disguise as faithful servant-girl.

“If I did, he would not have to call me so often, would he?” I said.

He laughed.

“And then I would have another name, wouldn’t I?”

“I wonder what it would be.”

“Ago-Ago is another he uses.” I saw him examining my knobby chin. I thrust it forward.

“A sign of strength,” he pronounced. “You haven’t said if you remember me.”

“I remember,” I admitted.

“I am looking for someone to illustrate my books.”

“You know his work,” I said.

“Yes, but I want to see some.”

I was beginning to think this was a fishing expedition. But I pushed my account book behind me, and we picked our way to a corner of the workshop. I knew exactly which pile I wanted to penetrate.

I pulled out Hokusai’s designs, laying them carefully one by one on the floor, then lifting each one and putting it away after he had seen it. Here was the boat harlot: he still hadn’t sold this one. She was curled up in the stern with her head wrapped in black and her arms tucked inside a blanket. You could feel the cold and wet. She looked like Shino, but then all his women did. I showed him a couple of night views of Edo.

“These are nice,” I said grudgingly.

“Tell me what you like about them.”

“Oh, well, the designs and the colors,” I said. “But mostly I am happy for the lies they tell.”

“Lies!” Sanba laughed. “Surely not.”

“That’s what they’re for, isn’t it? For instance, when the painters make scenes of night, they show it as if you could see everything. But really you can’t see everything in the night because it’s dark. So that is a lie.”

“That’s not a lie,” said Sanba.

“What is it, then?”

“A technique.”

“Just as I said.”

“You’re very absolutist for one so young.”

I didn’t like to be argued with. I flipped through the pictures with my fingers. “You don’t think so? Look. In the picture of the
netsuke
workshop, he shows all women working. That is not true. Only men work there. But men are not so interesting to look at for the people who buy prints. So he makes women in those jobs.”

“I see.”

“Do you want to see the
surimono
?”

“Yes, please.”

These were poetry cards that Hokusai made on commission to commemorate a birth or a death, a festival or a new year. They were delicate—beach at low tide, groups of figures among the weeds and shells and rusty anchors of the shore, glimpses of distant Fuji. These were influenced by Western art and by what the Dutch wanted.

Sanba looked at these—the faraway objects painted smaller than the ones in front; the curved horizons. “He has completely changed,” said Sanba. “That is brave for an artist who is not young anymore.”

“He changes all the time.”

“What is he working on now?”

Recently he had been making books of
manga,
which was another way of saying “everything in the world and how to draw it.” He took the sketches that he made at parties and made a collection of these pieces of paper, and from that came a little book for beginners that showed them how to draw. The simple pictures were often ones he had used in teaching me. I liked to think that he imagined them for me, bowlegged, bad-tempered girl that I was.

The pictures were of crabbed little people struggling to lift a barrel or stir a pot, of fat people, old women, drunken men, blind pilgrims. He used no models. He had seen them once, or maybe we had seen them together, but I forgot and he never forgot. And this first book,
How to Draw,
was a good seller. That made everyone happy, especially the publisher.

“Right now he’s making a book dedicated to Japanese women. Each one will be in the grip of a powerful emotion, and each at a different stage of her life.”

“Maybe he’s too busy, then.”

“I don’t think so.” I said. “We take anything on. What is it you want?”

“I’m thinking of writing a new version of
Chushingura,
the story of the Forty-seven Ronin. You know this famous story. I want to add scenes that are not known. There’s going to be another Kabuki play of the story. Do you like Kabuki?”

I smiled. It was something I rarely did. If you’re not pretty, why try? If your eyes are not almond and meek but round and high, with tight lids stretched over the bigness of your eyeballs. If your bulging lids cannot contain the rude health and impertinence of your spirit. If your legs when pressed together would allow a good-size cat to slip between the calves. If your hairline begins far back on your forehead, which swells with more brain than a woman deserves, and your chest is bony and a glimpse under your blue cotton kimono offers only jutting collarbone. I was suddenly acutely aware of these deficiencies and shut my smile.

“Yes, I believe I do, but I have never been to the theater.”

Sanba continued to look at me searchingly. I thought he was going to say something more, but he didn’t. My father was pretending to be engrossed in his work. I reached for some designs he had played with years ago. “This is how Hokusai would show the Forty-seven Ronin. Shall I tell you?” Everybody knew this story, but not our twist on it.

“Please,” said Sanba.

“The daimyo Takumi no Kami had many loyal followers. But he also had an enemy, Kozuke, the master of etiquette. The reason for this secret hatred was that Kozuke had fallen in love with the daimyo’s wife. He wrote her a declaration, which she treated the way a virtuous woman would, showing it to her husband. That was why the daimyo Kami raised his short sword against the master of etiquette.”

“Really?” said Sanba. “That’s a very interesting change to the story.”

“After this, the overlord commanded that the daimyo Kami kill himself, and so he did. Therefore, his forty-seven loyal retainers had no jobs and had to become wave men. That means they rolled back and forth with the waves because they had nothing to hold them still. Are you paying attention?” I said.

“You’re teasing me!”

“Not teasing but testing. Are you listening?” It was fun to talk to him. I was good at amusing old men. I played this way with my father.

“This Lord Kami, who had drawn his sword and had to die, you will remember, was very much liked by his retainers. And it was not his fault that he had raised his sword, because he was upset about his wife. So his retainers made a plan and waited for a very long time. Then they would carry it out and get revenge on the overlord.”