The Printmaker's Daughter (28 page)

And Tatsu. We watched her fail. I would squat behind her and wrap her chest in my arms to hold her erect while she went into coughing spasms. I tried to pass on the warmth of my heart, my strong spirit. Sometimes blood splattered out. She couldn’t paint then. We missed her work and the order she kept. The papers went into their former flyaway piles in corners. Her death was a disaster.

Hokumei, too, the merchant-class woman who had brought an air of delicacy and decency into our workshop, had her brief flight of productivity and then left us. I slept at home with my husband but lived from early morning until night at the North Star, where I ran the studio. I had a few students of my own by then. One was Mune, daughter of Hokumei. She became my friend and filled a little of the emptiness my sisters left.

As his women faded away, my father stopped laughing. Fellow artists and even disciples seized the opportunity to rise against him. Eisen, whom he had rejected, was now succeeding. Hokusai accused him of taking work that should have been ours. Masayoshi accused Hokusai of being a copycat; a certain former disciple called Dog Hokusai forged our work. I had to write a letter to our Osaka publisher on behalf of Hokusai: “My disciple Taito II is selling his paintings as ‘by Hokusai.’ That is unspeakable. Please make it stop.”

When my father wanted work done under his name, it was by me.

One day I came in to see Hokusai trembling on his side. He flopped his right arm out and shook it. It was loose, like a dead branch.

“How long have you been sitting there?”

His face twisted and his words seemed glued inside him.

“I yam p-pa-ar-lyzed,” he moaned.

It frightened me.

“You are not paralyzed! You’re moving.”

“I caa’an stan up.” He jerked around, trying to get to his feet.

I helped him stand.

“I waaan wal-kit
off.
”

He began to limp in little circles. I began to giggle. I thought he was clowning. I thought he had simply put his limbs to sleep by sitting.

“You’re paralyzed, but you want to walk it off?”

“I’m
wal
-kit off,
wal-kit
it off.”

He dragged his legs and his breath was labored. But he kept going, his face a mask of determination. I watched him. Then I knew. Suddenly he was the old man he had claimed to be since my birth.

“
Maa-ke
me sit. Sit!”

In those days he did not have a desk to work on. He used the top of a rice caddy. I pushed it in front of him and gave him his brush.

His brush was jerky and rigid. That made him angry. “You do it,” he said. “Liiie tha, no liie tha . . .” He wanted the line of the back thicker; he wanted the curve under the arm thinner. “Liiie tha. Yes. No! No! Noo dry bru stro—”

That was how it began.

We thought the palsy might be the end of him. It seemed to go on and on: the great man in this paralytic, spitting, jerking state. He hated being incapable. I was the only one with patience for him. Together we made designs for books of his “famous painting style.” I held his hand while he sketched mountains and trees and fishermen casting their lines into the sea—bald, smiling fishermen basking in the sun.

He told me a legend.

He sketched a bare hill and, behind it, a series of hills with narrow valleys between. “ ’S a grea’ army through t’ valley. It go-s to co-on-onquer far lands.” He drew the army caught between snow-covered mountains, where nothing but rock, ice, and the small, dark tips of buried trees were seen. The army lost their battles. They even lost their enemy. But the general and his troops pressed on. The general walked. His horse walked beside him, exhausted because the snow was deep.

The general had no advisers left; they had fallen in fatigue. All he had were these rows of mushroom-like men—my father’s arm was improving. He drew each face in the ranks under a shallow straw hat. The army stretched out of sight in the cleft of the farthest valley.

The great warlord was alone in the world. “So h’ asss-k he horse. Unnerstan’?”

“Yes. He asks his horse what to do.”

“Rii-t. ’E says, ‘Ho-oorse, what you think? We go on? Or we go ba-aack?’ ”

The horse too was old. He had been waiting many years for this question. Now it had come.

The picture grew under my father’s brush. He held his limp hand with his good hand and drew lines. Each strand of straw on the soldiers’ raincoats and each flagstaff, each rock or treetop protruding through snow, each small disk of hat in that huge army, he drew.

Ahead of the horse were no footprints. Behind him were the general and hundreds on hundreds of men. In his spine and the angle of his head and the way his eyes followed the ground, the horse from my father’s brush expressed his weariness, his resolution, his careful retreat.

The men held their flagpoles high, but the fabric was tattered. Their small feet in black leggings wobbled on the uneven, trodden surface and among the footprints of those ahead of them. The warhorse watched the ground in front of him.

“If we go on, we’ll be the conquerors; we’ll be the emperors. We’ll have gold and glory and be celebrated for our bravery.” The general let the reins drop. “Or should we turn back? If we do, we reach home again.”

The horse did not have to ponder. It turned and began to plod home, riches and glory of no interest.

“Wha’s vir-tue?” said Hokusai.

“Acceptance of defeat?” I guessed.

He shook his head.

“Fidelity?”

No. This made my father scoff. “N-nnn-no.”

“What is it, then?”

“S-s-ssim-plishty.”

Simplicity.

What was his message to me? That I was the warhorse—there when all else was lost? That I should forgo further battles and further dreams and head home? That “simplicity” should be mine—in heart, in art, in thought?

Would he do the same? Was he giving up?

It puzzled me, and I thought about it for many days.

I had no liking for simplicity. Tomei was simple. He reached for me, and when I pulled away from him, he smiled anyway and put his hands behind his head so he could watch me.

“Why are you watching me?”

“I think you are beautiful.”

How could he? I knew I was ugly.

Another symptom of his simplicity was this: he could not see ghosts. That was lucky, because I never lay down with him without the ghost of Sanba alongside. It brought with it his familiar scent of leaves and pine needles, of something half-burned, a wood smell. I suppose it was the scent of Sanba’s quack remedies. I loved it.

My husband was a gem, a genuine fine fellow. He was fond of life and free of anger. He was not conventional: he would have accepted anything I gave him. Yet I had nothing for him but a cruel streak that was entirely new to me.

22.

Family

I
WENT TO VISIT
my mother.

Her cheeks had fallen in on her gums. Long-suffering but never silent, she had declined to a garrulous, greedy poverty. There were no riches for her in the artist’s life: she cared for neither prints nor books. She wanted food and warmth, which Hokusai disdained. He became gentle with her, as if she were an old dog.

She was at her sister’s, bundled on a mattress. There had been a crisis. My aunt was crying. The cats were mewling and children stood in corners. My mother had fallen, standing in a crowd at the fishmonger’s. She had to be carried home.

We sent a child for a bonesetter. He put his hands on her and said there was a broken circle in her pelvis.

“It must knit and mend. She must be absolutely still, or it will grow crooked and she will never walk again.”

My father stammered his question: she appeared to be quite dead, but could she come back to life if she wanted?

“Western medicine knows about broken bones. But for broken spirit, the gods of Japan are better,” said the doctor.

“She broke her spirit in a fall at the fishmonger’s?”

“Earlier,” said my aunt.

My mother moved.

“She ’eears us,” said Hokusai. “Sh-she-shee sa-ay she will c-c-c-come ba’.”

“Are you a mind reader now, Old Man?” I said.

“I’m a
re-re-ree-
ader of faaa-ces.”

“Then what is my mother’s face saying?”

Hokusai hung his head.

“Talk to her. Maybe you can change her mind.”

“I c-c-caan’ t-taalk—”

The gods had taken away his eloquence when he needed it.

I became the translator.

“My father wishes to say, ‘Wife, come back to me. My life will be better with you. I am not ready for you to die,’ ” I said woodenly.

Hokusai waved his hands. Apparently he did not like my words.

My brother Sakujiro was there. He had become a solemn young man and adept at accounts, something unusual in our family. Yet humor was in his eyes; he clearly was Hokusai’s son. He alone could tease me. “What would you know about those words, Chin-Chin? You who laugh at your husband?”

“You’d be surprised what I know.”

Hokusai blinked.

“Maybe she is right to want to die,” I said.

Sakujiro looked at me quietly. “You and our mother are one and the same.”

That surprised me. My mother was an ordinary drudge who understood nothing. But I had her face, it was true.

“This is the one who cast you away,” he said. “The one who said your strong spirit must be broken. Now you would cast her away?”

“I don’t cast her. I only want her spirit to rest.”

My mother lay on her mat. Her eyes darted on the inside of her eyelids. My aunt nursed her. My father remained wordless. There would be no reconciliation.

What did she watch, inside those eyelids? The landscape of her life had been gray. There would be, on that curtain, no festival fireworks, no boat rides on the Sumida, no great processions, no ribald ditties, no laughter and cups of sake to warm her. No unfolding of red-striped velvets or canopy of
sakura,
even in the imagination. She would only see the inside of that sac that enclosed her. What did it look like?

I had seen my sister give birth. I knew colors—blood red, black waste, and the afterbirth with its rainbow shimmer. I had seen death too: the flesh-wrapped bones at the Punishment Grounds; the defiant, flat face on the march of the doomed; even fish at the fishmonger’s. Fish were the last thing she saw—lying on their sides; silver, green, or blue, with arcs of pink; fading hour by hour as their cool, watery spirit ebbed away.

Most likely she was still watching the weigh scales; life was in the balance.

“Say loving things,” I told my father. “The kinds of things you said to Shino. Say them, if you want to change her mind.”

For once I had shut my father up. Hokusai opened his lips. They moved in silence. “I c-c-aaan’t.”

We both stared down at her. This object had produced me, then handed me off. I knew the reason. From the very start, she had recognized me: I was her. She had been willful. And with what miserable outcome? She had sought to spare me.

“Poor Hokusai,” they said. “Another wife to die on him, and now who will keep house?”

A
HUSBAND COULD
leave his wife for being barren. But Tomei didn’t blame me. To him, the fault was Hokusai’s.

“Your father is your baby,” he said.

More than once, his simple logic hit its mark.

Still, nearly ten years of childlessness did not ruin our marriage. I’ll tell you what ruined our marriage. It was food: the getting of it and the serving of it. I had thought we would be artists together, whereas Tomei wanted to be served his home-cooked meals.

I loved the food market. That’s where I got our meals. It was divine. There were eggplants covered in miso paste. There were ruffled dumplings and crimson pomegranates and tiny grilled whitefish with bronze skin. Curled blush shrimp with their transparent shells and fine whiskers; shaved purple cabbage in vinegar; cubes of bean curd swimming in squid ink—it was all so beautiful. One day I had a little money from a commission. I came back with grilled fish and eggplant and deep-fried tofu squares, his favorite dinner. I was proud to be providing it.

But he tossed away the banana leaves that wrapped it.

“Why?” I said, my mouth full and open. The food was hot.

“You didn’t cook it for me.”

Did he want me to stand outside on the hard earth and bring him his plate on bended knees? “No, but I bought it.”

“It’s not the same. A wife cooks.”

“Why would I do that? I am an artist who earns our keep.”

Tomei began to shout and wave the broom around. “You serve him.” He jerked his head toward my father’s house. “Serve me too.”