The Printmaker's Daughter (51 page)

They muscled through the door with a great show of reverence for the dead. But among them they said, in voices loud enough for me to hear, “She is just a daughter. She cannot inherit the seal. She is not the first among us.”

The seal was two things: it was the practical way of stamping a painting or print as being by Hokusai, and it was also the symbol of the artist’s power. I had the seal of 88, but to the disciples that did not mean I was to inherit the mantle of greatness. And with Hokusai nothing was simple: there was still the other seal, the seal of 100.

I explained that Hokusai had left nothing, that they should be content with the bits and pieces of his names. That they must find their own way.

“The Old Man was crazy in the end,” they said. “Otherwise, you would not be the one to inherit the seal. Before he went mad he said I could have the—”

It tried my patience past its limit. For five years I had spent every minute with the Old Man as he declined. I suppose you could call him crazy. But it was the same habit of mind he had displayed all his life, only more extreme. I had ruled, in secret and by tricks. I had spared us all the bald truth, and it was now held against me.

“The master alone was in charge of this studio,” the Hoku-boys said. “You were only ever his helper.”

“He was palsied!” I said. “He was dying! Who do you think did the fine work?”

“Oh, the details, maybe,” said someone offhandedly.

Fukawa, a smooth man of about my age and a fair painter, raised his arm to still the rising voices. “Listen to the master’s daughter!”

They grudgingly fell silent.

I opened my mouth to speak, but Fukawa continued.

“We know you are responsible for much that has been produced. But you cannot do this work without him here to tell you how.”

It had been a very long time since Hokusai had told me how to paint or design. In the last decade it had been the reverse. And they knew it; they had seen him. I was insulted. I stood up and gestured that they should leave my home. It was another decision I came to regret. They muttered and moved off resentfully, and no doubt congregated elsewhere to complain about me.

To calm myself, I went for a drink in the old teahouse. I smoked my pipe and wished for the counsel of Eisen or even the long-lost Sanba—someone who believed in me. There was no one left I could trust. In my heart I knew I could continue to lead the studio forward. How could I make the world listen?

I made my way home. It was dark. The moon had wandered off, and dawn was nowhere near. I saw a geisha sliding in her high clogs. She came to a standstill, waving her long-fingered hands. “Oh, help me. P-please, I am sli-ding!” Useless creature. In a few hours the street would come alive: the outside men with their shovels and weather-darkened skin would come down the center of the road.

Dirty old world—how I loved it.

My room was empty. I lit the lamp. It was in those small hours, one day after the next, that I completed the paintings I had promised my father I would finish. This one was a tiger bounding through a snowstorm. It was a portrait of the Old Man. The summer moors of his death poem had become winter fields. I made his claws. I made the needles of the pine branches to mimic them. I made the fine hairs of fur on his hindquarters. I made the soft pads of his feet, under his toes, modeling them on the toes of my cats. I gave him a beatific smile. Bending close to the silk, I made Hokusai’s signature, as I had so often done. I pulled out the stone seal from its hiding place, behind the statue of Saint Nichiren in the orange crate, and with a little red ink stamped it on the fabric: Hokusai, age 88. I blew out the lamp and went to bed. The sun was rising.

It was noontime before I woke up. The neighbors, those who did not see my lamplight, called me a lay-abed and scolded—affectionately, I add, but scolded nonetheless—that I was a drunken woman.

In broad daylight, I checked to see that the paint was dry. I rolled the silk and tucked it under my arm. Genial to all my detractors, I walked into the sunlight and straight to the shop of Sakai-san, outside the gates of the castle. He was the son of the wealthy merchant I had met in Obuse, a slim and elegant man, like a Noh dancer. He did not look like he could withstand a strong wind. But he had excellent taste. He held his hands in front of his chest to take the scroll from me. Then we unrolled
Tiger in Snow.
Sakai’s intake of breath made me proud and happy.

“I have other works from my father’s last years,” I said. “I’ll bring them one at a time.” We arranged that he would give me money when I needed it.

And in that way time passed.

“W
HAT WILL YOU
do?” asked my brother Sakujiro.

He appeared in the doorway, surprising me. I was sitting in the
kotatsu,
tucked under the quilt, drinking tea, just waking. Feeling it necessary to achieve equality, I scrambled to my feet.

“What will I do?” I repeated.

As Hokusai’s oldest living son, he had inherited responsibility for me. It was a strange question all the same. What I had always done. What I
was
doing. “Work as an artist, live here.”

“But how can you, without the Old Man?” he said.

He was a good brother. He was not stupid or coarse. He was even a little cultured: he wrote haiku; he had a pen name. I put on my downward and sideways glance.

“I see that is my answer,” he said. “You can’t.”

“Of course I can. I am. I have been and I will be working as an artist.”

It was as if I hadn’t spoken. “Come to live with us,” he said. “We have taken over the house in Uraga. I have been promoted to accounting manager,” he said. He was paid eighty rice barrels every year.

“You could have helped us.” It came out of my mouth.

“He had you,” my brother said. “That was all he wanted.”

I looked into his face, astonished.

And he went away, scowling at my door as he went. “I will be back.”

So much had been hidden by the hugeness of Hokusai. Here were my brother and I, both in need—I to be freed of my father’s grip and he to feel his father’s love.

He came again.

“Sakujiro!” I said, bending over my work and barely lifting my head. Would we ever recover from the imbalance created because I had too much father and he had too little? I was painting a miniature of flowers. So many petals, each one gold or orange. Each one like a slim tongue curling upward, red on top, yellow underneath.

“Ei, my sister”—he came straight to his point—“you cannot continue to live on your own. The studio has broken up and you cannot make a living as one brush.”

“What have I been doing? You can see that it is quite possible.” And I was not always on my own. I visited my students; I went to stay with patrons for whom I did commissions.

“I gave you time: I supposed you would have work of the Old Man’s to clear away. . . . You are not getting younger.”

“A few years is no time at all.”

He threw up his hands in frustration. “You can’t afford to be choosing. I am offering to look after you.”

He paced in my small rooms. Three steps to the back wall, three steps to the front; three steps to the far wall, three back. His toes were at the edge of my fabric. I daintily moved it an inch away.

“What are you doing? Still trying to make a go of it as an artist in your own right?”

“I’m not
trying,
” I said mildly. “I am doing it. As I have done for a long time. Even while Hokusai was living.”

I begged him to sit, and he did. I called the boy next door to bring us tea. We sat with the bowls in the palms of our hands, warming them but not our hearts. I tried reason. I explained to him carefully that for the past many years, while Hokusai was alive, my work had kept us going.
My
work, not his.

It was the last time I tried to tell anyone this. Sakujiro simply did not believe it. He told me I was crazy. He put down his tea and leaped to his feet. He shook his fists at me. My words hung in the air. He batted them away. He stood over me. This meant he had to look down on the top of my head, which was inclined to my silk. I could feel him studying me. Crazy old woman, he was thinking; she suffers delusions.

I felt the blaze of humiliation. I was furious. I hated him then. I hated everyone for the way they saw me. My anger came bubbling up my throat. I opened my mouth.

But just in time I remembered Shino’s advice: dissemble. “Let them think you are entirely in their hands.” I sensed a way out, sniffed it out like a dog. My father had said I was the next best thing to a soothsayer. You should go to Uraga, a voice told me. Uraga is a nice place. Take up his offer. Satisfy his vanity. Just for a little, go along with this idea. Then he’ll leave you alone.

I angled my head to the right. As a gesture, it might resemble submission; it could be taken for assent. I lifted my chin, to see into his eyes. They were opaque. I gave a little smile.

“I won’t lie to you,” I said softly. “The work is harder to find.”

“You see? Of course it is. Changing style never stops for anyone.”

“I can still rely on Takai Kozan. He is paying me two
ryo
of gold and two
bu
for the silk scrolls of chrysanthemum. It is more than he paid us when my father was alive.”

But he heard only the name and nothing else.

“Kozan? You see! That’s just the problem. You’ll stumble into trouble. Those pro-Western samurai are very dangerous. They are fomenting revolution. And that art dealer you see, the one with the shop near the shogun’s castle, he is also marked as suspicious.”

“Sakai-san? Dangerous?”

How did he know I went there?

My brother paced in his bare feet on the tatami as if he were a judge taking evidence. “We are agreed then. You will not go on living here,” he said. “You will come and live with my family. On the seashore. It is cleaner. You will be healthier.”

Why did he care? Was this love? Did he mean to repair our broken family? I was not able to judge.

I simpered. Difficult for me, but I managed it. “You would take a helpless old lady into your household?”

He smiled, victorious. “You are my sister, after all.”

“All right, I will come, just for a short visit. We’ll see if this act of kindness is one that we can all live with.”

To myself, I thought how good it would be to see the ocean waves again.

40.

Black Ships

A
ND THAT IS
how I came to be present on that night.

I had walked out of Sakujiro’s garden and then beyond. I climbed the hill. I stood overlooking the sea. The wind was at my back, blowing away from the land. It tore my hair out of its knot, throwing it over my face. A feeling of freedom came to me, from such a simple thing. The town was below me, homes lit by small lanterns. It was July 8, 1853, by the Western calendar. Night had fallen. White rows of foam turned themselves over on the beach, but farther out, hard crests like little mountain ranges of water hared off. The water was moving away from us. Beyond the visible crest, the ocean became one with the misty gray sky. There was no horizon.

Promising Yasayuke and the apprentices that I would return, I had closed the doors of the North Star Studio. I was a defenseless old woman being sent to live with relatives in Uraga. For Hokusai, this place had been a safe hideaway from the searching eyes of the
bakufu,
a simple fishing village. We had played in the waves here.

But this had been only the surface. Now Uraga was the tip of our outstretched fingers. Since Western ships had appeared in the bay, Western-leaning samurai had made it a meeting place. Perhaps they always had. Conspiracies were hatched here. The
bakufu
were wary: cannons were mounted on these very hills, the hills of Miura, above the town.

How much of this had the Old Man known? Had he met Kozan here? Why did he keep this from me? To protect me? Or just to protect his secrets, which were numerous.

The moon came through a cloud and I saw something coming in on the waves. What was it?

More moon, and I saw it was a man struggling with an oar. He was light; his skin shone in the moonlight. I could see no boat or waves. Then the moonlight was gone and he was too.

The moon came out again. I saw him, farther in. I saw that he was the first, a small pilot boat. Something much larger was coming behind.

It was a black ship. The white foam tossed and obscured it. The background swallowed it. But that’s what it was: a dark, edgeless boat. It looked like a visitor from the spirit world.

Gradually, the mist cleared; the moonlight came through. I saw another and then another black ship. They were sailing against the wind. And they were breathing white smoke. They came dancing into Edo Bay from the open sea.

Oh, I was dumbstruck to see that magic: the ships moving forward when the wind pushed them back.