The Printmaker's Daughter (31 page)

Later, he patted the new seedlings into place in his garden. He had magnolias and wisteria and varieties of pine. To each one he gave a small whispered blessing: take root!

A
T NIGHTFALL, THE
island was so silent that he could hear the waves slurping at the Water Gate. At the City Gate the prostitutes presented their red-stamped passports to the implacable guards and went quickly in their hobbled gait to the men. He saw one clearly in silhouette as she crossed the courtyard. Pregnant. The children of these liaisons were adopted into Japan; a Dutch father had no claim—and maybe wanted none.

No woman arrived for him. Restless, he sat and read the essays in stiff Dutch, offering him the secrets of the people’s customs, their laws, their history as they understood it, the art of healing by needles. He went to the toilet in the backyard. He had glued the chart of Japanese characters on the wall so he would not waste time there either. It was in this refuge, thinking over the day’s class, that he resolved to persuade the doctors to perform caesarean sections. He would do that by offering his best students a very special Dutch doctor’s diploma.

And this would give him reason to apply to the
bugyo,
the governor of Nagasaki, for special leave to make daily consultations off the island. Lives would be saved and he would get out.

The next day, von Siebold expressed this plan carefully to de Sturler. The request was duly transmitted to the Japanese. A message came back, so courteous. No. We are very sorry.

They gave no reason. Von Siebold argued in his mind with the invisible
bugyo.
He had only Japanese interests at heart. Lives of women were being lost, or more important, one could say, lives of boy children were being lost. But he could not ask again, he knew that, and so he dug pig manure. He was kneading it into the roots of his hostas when a messenger came. The man was burdened with heavy braided armor, two swords, and a flag and standard.

He brought a written summons: the doctor must go to the home of a wealthy merchant who had been struck blind.

Von Siebold was only too happy. He put on his giant hat and his black cape, took the gold-handled cane and the black leather bag containing the surgical tools. With a samurai in front of him and a samurai behind him, he walked out the City Gate into the early morning and the town.

The first thing to hit him was the sound. He heard the guttural cries of porters pushing donkeys. Hawkers were singing in a higher pitch. Temple bells clanged. The life of the place hit him between the eyes: women wrapped in sashes and in fabrics of stripes and swirls; men running with tea caddies. A riot of country people selling faggots and birds in cages, turnips and fish on skewers. Children of three were lighting fires under huge cauldrons. Fishermen with dark skin and bands across their brows had their catch in barrels. A procession of pilgrims all in white went by, chanting and looking at the ground. It made him laugh out loud. He was among—and towered a foot and a half above—these preoccupied people.

He could have walked forever, but the merchant’s house was not far away. In a bogus show of force intended to impress, the guards pushed von Siebold though the gate. At the door, a shy young woman bowed him in. The interior was dim, black-timbered with low ceilings. Von Siebold had to remove his hat, but he was still too tall, so he stooped and leaned to the side.

The merchant Kusumoto sat cross-legged on a Chinese cushion. He did not flinch under von Siebold’s glare. The Dutch doctor could see that a whitish film was spreading over the man’s eyes. It was a simple case of cataracts. At school he had watched the operation to remove them, but he had never done it himself. Nevertheless, he told Kusumoto with confidence that he could restore his eyesight.

Modest and solemn, the daughter showed him out.

In his quarters again, he asked the Malaysian servants to bring him the head of a pig. He could hear the squealing as they decapitated the animal. He had the head drained of blood. He sharpened his scalpels. He played his piano scales and blew on his fingers, warming them. “Be clever, be agile,” he whispered, tapping them on the edge of his lips. He put on his medical coat.

In the operating room he cut into the skin of the dead pig’s eyes, removing the coating over its still-warm cornea. He thought that he acquitted himself reasonably well.

“Are you a butcher now?” cracked de Sturler from the doorway.

“If I am to cure a man of blindness, first I must practice.”

“Hmmm. You conduct a dress-rehearsal operation. Your logic is flawed, don’t you think?”

“I don’t, but perhaps you do?”

“The pig is a pig,” drawled his boss, leaning into the room. “As it had no cataracts, its sight cannot have been improved. And even if it could, how would the pig tell you he could see better—or worse, in fact? This would be true even if it were alive. But on top of it all, the pig is dead.” De Sturler slapped his leg and roared.

My superior dislikes me. It is simple jealousy, von Siebold thought calmly. He had encountered it before: men took offense at the excess of natural gifts he displayed.

The next day he marched off with his guards to Kusumoto’s house with operating equipment and a brighter lamp. He was afraid. If he botched the operation, he would get no more favors from the Japanese. He might even be punished. He asked the daughter, Otaki, to assist. He would have preferred a man, but one was not available and the girl was excellent. Even when her father’s eyes were being peeled, she had qualities of repose and alertness that impressed him.

When the operation was done, Kusumoto declared that he could see perfectly. The foreign doctor had miraculous powers.

“Not so!” von Siebold insisted.

But word spread. The next day the Japanese guards were calling him the Miracle Doctor. Three days later he knelt in Kusumoto’s receiving room. The merchant seemed to be proposing Otaki to him as a gift. Von Siebold pretended that he didn’t understand. He promised to visit them again. The matter was suspended.

As he left, he thanked the girl for her assistance. She was modest, murmuring over and over that she had done nothing. But it seemed now to von Siebold that she had held his hand and made it steady, and he noticed how very pretty she was.

He was allowed a little freedom. Several times a week he walked with only one guard through the market to the merchant’s house to check on his patient. It became understood that he loved the girl and she him. All of this happened quickly. In order to visit him at Deshima, Otaki produced her passport. There was the red stamp of the courtesan. The family seemed to say that she had requested this so she could serve the doctor. Had she been a prostitute before? Here von Siebold’s Japanese proved inadequate.

Six months after his arrival at Nagasaki, Philipp wrote to his uncle in Holland that he was happy. (When had he ever been unhappy?) He said: “I have temporarily become quite attached to a sweet sixteen-year-old Japanese girl, who I would not willingly exchange for a European one.”

W
ITHIN A YEAR
von Siebold had permission to build a medical school in a pretty valley with a waterfall. He went there freely most mornings, lectured all day, and returned to the island at night. He had amassed a big collection of plants and added to it constantly. He sent new species—hydrangea, cypress, delphinium, cherry, iris—back to Europe every time a ship left. And he had objects. With the lower class of people, he found bribery successful in getting them to part with their treasures. With the educated, he made exchanges—his knowledge for theirs. As far as officials went, it was easy to convince them that they saw nothing by offering his expertise in questions of their family health.

Otaki came to the island. She was allowed to live with him, given her new status. Her presence was far more effective in his learning Japanese than the chart of
kana
on the wall of the toilet. He had been on the island only two years when she was on the table, laboring under his hands. The child was a female, and von Siebold loved both his wife and his daughter very much. He was sad that the two were forced to move off Deshima, but on this point the laws of Japan did not bend, not even for the Miracle Doctor. Mrs. von Siebold would live with her child in her father’s home, and the child would belong to Japan. Philipp visited them every day. He now had a clinic under the whispering waterfall; the grateful Japanese built a house for him, and he stayed there many nights himself. It was strictly forbidden, but no one seemed to notice. Students stood in groups five deep to watch him as he did operations. “They hang on my lips,” he told Otaki. She laughed because you could not say that in Japanese: it made a ridiculous picture.

Perhaps the only sour note was his relationship with the
opperhoofd.
A certain strain existed there. But even that seemed to be easing. De Sturler had spoken to him: soon the Dutch mission must travel to Edo to give tribute to the shogun.

Von Siebold would join the procession.

I
N LATE FEBRUARY
the snow was gone from the hills, and the white tips of the hostas were inches above the soil. The buds on the plum trees were swollen, and von Siebold’s daughter was two years old by the Japanese count, which gave her one year at birth. Nearly sixty Japanese and three Dutch set off to walk the six hundred miles to the Eastern Capital. They carried food, silver, glassware, and furniture—including the piano—and many gifts for the shogun. Von Siebold packed his tools—barometers, chronometers, sextants. He intended to measure and record everything he passed. A Japanese draftsman hired to draw the sights walked alongside. Von Siebold himself sat in a sedan chair and made notes as he, a European, one of only a handful ever to go there, passed through the forbidden countryside.

Word had spread. Peasants grouped by the wayside with curiosities: the miscarried fetus of an albino deer, a child with seizures, a beautiful shell. They stood in the rain and waited for hours.

The guards were at first suspicious and later lax, allowing von Siebold to get down, minister, and take gifts. One day the servants caught a giant salamander with a head like an arrow, a long spiny body, and a pointed tail. It was five feet long and looked prehistoric. Von Siebold had them build a cage and sent it back to Deshima with instructions that the servants feed it rats, which were plentiful under the floorboards.

He jolted along in his enclosed chair on the shoulders of the bearers for many days. Then suddenly, mystically, the white cone of Mount Fuji appeared against the sky. He jumped down and got out his sextant to measure its height. There were murmurs of discontent among the guards. Von Siebold got back into his sedan, and they walked on.

But there was Mount Fuji again. He insisted on being let down to measure it. The canny peak seemed to leap out at them, first from one direction and then from another. Eventually, not to upset the guards, he hid his sextant and compass in his hat and pulled them out only when he thought no one was watching. From then on, whenever he saw the mountain raise its perfect head, he stepped out of the procession and surreptitiously measured it.

A
FTER WALKING FOR
two months, the procession arrived in Edo. It was April 10, 1826, he noted. Here, unlike in friendly Nagasaki, he felt like a freak. Crowds clogged the streets to see the three tall, red-haired barbarians. The Dutch were immediately closed up in Nagasakiya House to await their audience with the shogun. Important scientists came calling. They were the
rangaku-sha,
and many had been newly named by the former
opperhoofd.
Mogami was there. Genseki, the court physician, was there. Takahashi Sukuzaemon, the court astronomer, was now called Globius.

These men wanted books, and they brought documents to trade. But von Siebold knew you could learn as much or more from the images the Japanese made. His predecessor had bought a pair of scrolls from the painter Hokusai. One scroll was much admired and the other was considered to have had a spell cast on it: whoever owned it took sick and died. This Hokusai, von Siebold believed, was a court painter. He asked that he too be brought to the Nagasakiya.

24.

Meeting

A
LITTLE FELLOW CAME
tripping into our slum with a message: the Dutch Miracle Doctor wanted to meet the court painter Hokusai.

“Court painter!” I fell over sideways, laughing.

My father gave no sign he heard. This was his way, more and more often. But I was all ears. Maybe the red-haired barbarian would buy paintings. His predecessors had. Times were grim, and I remembered how in years before we’d briefly prospered on the Dutch trade.

The Old Man was annoyed that day. It was not a significant irritation. I can’t even remember it. Maybe the message itself put him off. He never liked anyone important. Sycophants too had to be put in their place. Maybe he remembered the old insult from Captain Hemmy, who tried to buy the scroll at half price. Maybe he was thinking of the bitter words between himself and my mother on the subject of that famous payment of 150
ryo.
He was sentimental about her now she was gone.