The Printmaker's Daughter (24 page)

I meant to go back home, but I couldn’t leave her. I went back to the Corner Tamaya and coaxed Kana to let me inside. Shino was not allowed outside that night, in case she ran. I came in to see her seated in front of her oval mirror while Fumi shaved off her eyebrows. It was the custom for married women. Fumi soaped the arch of soft black hairs that had always informed me ahead of time of Shino’s mood, whether it was dangerous or not. Then she pulled them out, one by one.

“You’ll have a wide forehead, to be in the wide world,” said Yuko. The women tittered.

“Your hair will be down and you will wear the blue stripes of the townswoman.”

All these good wishes! A wedding kimono of white silk and a dress for after the ceremony, made of red silk, hung over the screen. The blind man had given the fabric. His family waited for her. They had come to dinner to meet her the night before, and she had charmed them with her koto and her dance. She had spoken to them of poetry and religion, just as she ought.

“You shuddv
heard
her: she wz fabulous. We listened behind the screen,” said one of the apprentices. “The way she
talks
’z music!”

The last part of the ritual took place in the kitchen. The maids brought a large bowl of water. The Yoshiwara was marshy land, originally. Before leaving it, a retiring courtesan washes its mud off her feet. Shino’s feet were narrow and arched, unblemished. They would be clean when she started her new life.

She sat on a stool and put one foot in the bowl, wincing from the cold. We each took a turn, soaping one foot and then the other. Yuko tried to remove the bowl; a fresh bowl of rinse water was on the way. She slipped and nearly fell, catching herself on another girl’s shoulder. That girl pushed back. Shino dipped her toe down and sent a perfectly aimed spray at Kana’s face. I put my hand in the bowl and swept out a great wave.

“Aeeii, you little shit! I’m soaked!” Fumi got control of the bowl, dumping half of it on me. “Let’s wash off those sins!”

“You’re terrible! More water!” Everyone was splashing and sliding across the wooden floor and laughing.

I got no chance to ask Shino what her mother-in-law was like. I heard that her dowry belongings had been carried to the in-laws’ house already: her box of shells, her white face paint, her black brush and tweezers, even her long pole with the blade on the end, the
naginata,
reclaimed after these years from Shirobei, the guard at the gate. Now they had everything but her. I hoped it was true what they all said, that the family would accept her as the daughter they needed. After all, the son they had to offer was damaged goods as well, wasn’t he? I begged Kana to let me sleep over. My father would think I was with Sanba. But I wanted to stay at the brothel as I had when I was a child, one more time.

And I did: we lay on her mattress.

“What name will you take?” I said. “What was your name before?”

“I will not retire my name. I have discussed it with my husband. The young wife who was sent here is dead. But Shino is not. We have enough name changes in our lives, don’t you think?”

In the morning we rose late. She put her new white feet into socks. Socks! Allowed for the first time in nearly ten years! Her feet had always been cold. We wrapped her in the new kimono. She grasped me by the shoulders as soon as she saw me and asked me to carry her bedding to the women on the canalside. “They need it,” she said.

The ceremony was nearly the same as a funeral. Jimi and Kana had lit torches at either side of the door, to signal the departure of a dead body. The blind man and his brothers came to the front door with a palanquin. Kana tossed rice grains in the little carrying box to purify it. Then Shino stepped inside, and the porters lifted it for her journey back across the Bridge of Hesitation. I saw no more of her.

I missed her terribly for almost a full year. But when the date of her marriage came around again, I stopped hating her and began to understand what it is to stay alive. We ourselves were working from dawn until the light fell. I thought I might one day see her at Nihonbashi or near the theaters, her hair tied and hanging down her back, loosed from its artificial courtesan’s mound. It was one reason I loved to do the outside errands. But Edo was so enormous. I supposed there was little hope of our meeting by chance.

19.

The Painting Competition

O
N CERTAIN OCCASIONS
Sanba dropped by the studio, diffident in his plain black kimono. Could I come to the theater?

Once, after we had made our plans, Hokusai looked over and said, “You think you are pulling one over on your old man, don’t you?”

“No, I don’t.”

And he didn’t stop me.

In the theater I entered the melodrama of my times. I watched depraved sons and greedy merchants. I liked the warrior plays, stories set in the long-ago past but understood to represent the politics of Edo. Evil murderers, virtuous wives: I loved the suffering the actors put up onstage. I shouted along with the mob. Sanba called me a true believer.

After, to calm ourselves, we sat and smoked. I critiqued. I’d say an actor was heaven to look at or getting long in the tooth. A writer must live with his head down a mole hole. Or the costumes made my mouth water. “I just like to hear you talk, Strong-Jawed Woman,” Sanba would say. I could make him laugh, especially if I drank sake. And if he drank sake, he wanted to take me to bed. I must have pleased him a little or he wouldn’t have kept asking. I’d creep home before dawn, when the stars were still visible, in the Hour of the Ox. My father would unfailingly be hunched over his work.

The Forty-seven Ronin project never materialized, not with Sanba. My lover was always behind on his deadlines. He liked it that way. When he really needed to produce, he took a room over his publisher’s office. And if that didn’t work, he went into hiding. He emerged, sometimes weeks later, with a finished manuscript and a desire to celebrate. He found his home distracting because he had a small son. I didn’t know where he was most of the time.

But I knew he’d reappear. We sat in little bars on barges along the Sumida. We walked along together—slowly, because Sanba suffered from gout that made his feet and ankles hurt. I drank with the crowd of printmakers, writers, and hangers-on—my father’s friends, or they would have been, had he taken time to hang out with them.

I was happy then. I was a known entity: Hokusai’s daughter, Sanba’s lover, an apprentice artist. So what if my ears—like my father’s—were meant for a person twice my size? If I was afflicted with the inability to be compliant? This body gave me pleasure, and Sanba too.

A miracle had happened. Life had opened a place for me.

M
Y FATHER WAS
poor and proud of it. I began to understand why. It was his image, and it helped him become famous.

One day a furnisher for the shogun came to the North Star Studio. This in itself was astonishing. More astonishing was that Hokusai took an immediate dislike to the man and said he was busy.

“I come not to buy a painting,” the messenger told me. “I come with an invitation.” He looked as if he wished he didn’t have to.

Hokusai was not painting, but he was thinking about painting. Sometimes this took a long time. He sat on his mat in full view of the messenger, who was kept kneeling in the doorway. It was early summer. Our clothing was thin, plain cotton. The messenger remained on his knees, in his bright, padded jacket bearing the crest of the shogun. Eventually Hokusai waved. The man could speak.

“I bring an invitation to join the shogun Ienari on an afternoon of hunting.”

“Hunting?” my father murmured, very low. “I will show you hunting.” He asked me to bring him his outer robe.

Hokusai clad the subjects of his paintings in sumptuous velvets, but his own outer robe was shabby, had been worn many times, and was never cleaned. I reached for it where it hung over the top of the screen, noted its odor, and carried it to my father on outstretched arms. I hoped to demonstrate to the messenger of the shogun the necessity of showing deference.

Hokusai took the coat on his knees. He stretched out the collar and squinted at it. He made a quick jab, two fingers held like pincers. He gave a grunt of satisfaction. He peered again, running the fabric through his fingers. “Ah!” he said and again jabbed at the garment. “Mmmm!”

He was hunting a louse. I tried to see the messenger’s face, but I couldn’t. He didn’t move; I didn’t move.

He caught a dozen, crushing the barely visible creatures between the tips of his thumb and forefinger with great noises of satisfaction. He seemed to be alone in his world. To interrupt would bring a shower of abuse. The messenger, accustomed to self-abasement at the palace, waited. Hokusai hunted and pecked, hunted and pecked.

Finally he had had enough.

“Hey, you! Ooo-ei,” he said. “Is there a messenger waiting?”

“Yes, Father.”

“Tell him I can see him now.”

The invitation was to attend a falcon-hunting party at the tidal gardens. The painter Buncho of the Shirakawa clan would be there, and the shogun wanted an impromptu painting competition. This was the heart of enemy territory. Sadanobu was fond of Buncho. Suddenly Hokusai was jovial.

“I would be delighted. One request: may I bring my daughter?”

The messenger bowed. “We provide you with as many servants as you need.”

“No, no. No servants. Only my daughter can be trusted with my brushes.”

I didn’t mind the long walk to the hunting site. It was the live chicken that annoyed me. Hokusai strode resolutely, bowlegged, in front. I came behind with the ink and the squawking covered cage that bumped against my shins. People averted their eyes, as if I were burping uncontrollably. Behind me the shogun’s servant carried the roll of paper and a large mop.

Our destination was the marsh at Tokyo Bay, near the mouth of the Sumida River. Ienari had become shogun at eighteen; he was over forty now. Sadanobu’s reforms had affected him perversely: Ienari was dissolute, quixotic, and indulgent. He had built a brothel inside the castle, lattice and all. All of Edo knew he often canceled his afternoon appointments to take a falconry day in the marsh.

The tide flooded in and out through a narrow water gate. A huge pine tree grew at one edge. It was famous because it was one hundred fifty years old. Irises with fat purple flames were in bloom. Riding trails threaded around a little teahouse. A small mound representing Mount Fuji was there for ladies to climb.

The shogun’s retinue stood by, with mounted warriors and standing warriors as wide as they were tall. Ienari himself beckoned us on, smiling and lighthearted; he looked like a fat boy. We trudged over three bridges that zigzagged through the tall grasses. They stood in water a foot deep, the pillars supporting them iced with salt.

I felt the nearness of the sea. The tide was coming in. At the sandy edges of the water little crabs scuttled. The sun was hot, and as the water rose, the marshes began to glint, like metal. The birds couldn’t hide—not the ducks along the soft edges of the sandy earth that bordered the pond or the small birds with yellow wings that were perched on the tall spires of sea grass, bending them.

The falcon sat on shogun Ienari’s wrist with the sun flashing on its majestic little metal helmet. It was chained and clad in feathered leggings. The shogun wore an elegant deerskin glove. Everyone stood as in a trance. In the silence you could hear the insects. Hokusai scratched his ass. Buncho, the official artist, stood straight and looked at home surrounded by lords. Sadanobu—paunchy, hard-nosed, softer, somehow womanish—stood nearby. He looked at Hokusai with a curl in his lip.

There was a murmur, an instruction somewhere in the ranks.

No one flinched.

The chicken made a ghastly screech, as if it were being killed.

Ienari alone laughed. My arm ached from holding the cage. I lowered it a little.

My father jerked his head at me: up, up. I raised it.

I had no idea what he was planning. But my irritation was great enough to make me forget my fear. My father played a dangerous game. These lords, and the shogun himself, were impulsive and could have had us in prison for impudence. Did Hokusai play the game because of his pride in his samurai background or—remembering the sign he put outside the door of each of our dwellings:
HOKUSAI, A PEASANT OF HONJO
—his pride in being simple?

The chicken squawked again. I switched it to my other arm. Ienari gave the signal to free the dogs. They bounded off magnificently. Splashing and barking and tearing first in one direction, then in another, in zigzags, circles, they scared up the birds: herons, larks. Up from one clump flew a crane. A crane! Symbol of good luck.

Then Ienari lifted the hood off the falcon. He released the chain. The predator trembled on the regal wrist. We all held our breath at our sovereign’s brilliance, which was really the bird’s brilliance, the brilliant threat of nature. The artists stood waiting. My arm ached. My chicken scratched. I lifted one foot and then the other. The platform squeaked. The water moved beneath. The grasses swayed, and bird cries tested every fiber of the falcon’s being.