The Ghost Brush (113 page)

I steadied myself against the cart. This was the world and I had only had reports of it before. I had only mixed its colours before. I saw the fat groom brushing the fatter samurai horse beside the inn; the carpenter dropping his tool in the water as he tried to fix the narrow wooden bridge. I imagined my father sleeping in the pine needles. I saw Hiroshige with his sketch pad, remote and serene, sketching the distant views.

We reached the top of the pass. The road went down from here, in both directions. I listened to the wind. The men untied the oxen. They put their headscarves in the stream and tied them on again.

“Going down is the hard part. Keep out of the way.”

They tightened their belts. They got in front of the cart, shoulders pressed to the boards.

The goods slid forward. The bushels strained against their straps and the barrels rumbled on the wood. The load had been heavy to bring up, and now it wanted down in a hurry. The hindquarters of the oxen snapped from side to side. The carters hopped behind the cart, using their weight to pull it backwards so it didn’t break its traces and crash into the oxen. When the path curved, the cart veered to one edge or the other. The carters swore and leapt and hung from the covered wagon.

Tachi and I ran behind.

The oxen plodded on, seeming not to notice the mad dance, the loud protests from the wooden wheels, the dragging and hopping of the men to keep the cart in the track. The men stopped and wet their foreheads. They swore and drank water and started again.

We came to the Spirit Trees. This was a famous place. There were two trees here that were inhabited by spirits. One was the vengeful ghost of a woman who was murdered. The other was her husband, who was the guilty party. For all the caravans, it was the place of resting. There was a small inn and an onsen, a hot spring.

The sun was slashing horizontally through the bare tree trunks by this time. The carters took off their harnesses, and the oxen were sent to the stable. The Eighteen were known here. The lead carter explained that I was “an item due to Koyama. His daughter, they say.” Large wink.

“More like his mother.”

The innkeepers exclaimed with delight over Tachi and took her off to the kitchen for food. I heard them singing and laughing. The carters began to drink and the prostitutes arrived, bringing mountain soba with mushrooms. I ate my noodles alone, sucking them up loudly. The innkeeper watched over me. The sun disappeared behind the hills, and the trees were now in darkness.

There was a strange welling in my chest, as if I had been struck on the breastbone. This feeling had come several times since I got my father’s letter. I never wept. At home, in the dark studio with my father, tears were like jewels; they glittered, out of place, a luxury from another sort of life. But this huge, black place welcomed them. I wiped my face with my sleeves. I smelled the cool damp of the earth.

Half a dozen carters went to the bath. I half-saw them scrub themselves over hot stones with little cloths. In the velvet darkness they climbed into the water. They lay with their heads back and their feet stretched out in the pool. They let out gusty cries of exhaustion.

“Come and join us, Katsushika Oei,” they said.

They knew my painting name?

“You are the daughter of the famous Old Man. Come and join us. We will greet the gods in the middle of the night.”

No one was there. Only the murdered woman-spirit in the trees and her murderous lover, now reconciled in petrifaction. And I was old, after all; they were no sexual threat to me, or I to them.

I took off my kimono, so I wore only my underskirt. I walked with a small cloth for cleaning myself to the water’s edge. I squatted, a shadow in the darkness. I pulled off my undergarment. I could see only the outline of my legs and my arms, but not the flesh of my body. I could feel the steam coming from the hot water and it beckoned me. The air was cold and intimate on my skin.

There were pine torches by the doors of the inn. But none shone any light here. The carters’ dark faces tilted side by side amongst the rocks. I slid in; the water was so hot it felt like ice.

With my hand I brushed something bobbing on the surface, and I almost screamed. I thought it was a male organ, and from the way the men guffawed, they meant me to. But it was a small wooden cup filled with sake floating on the surface of the water.

I downed it and reached for a refill. The men’s voices rose into the canopy. I lay my head against the stone rim of the bath. My body bobbed like that wooden sake cup; my body and the cup and the water were the same.

The moon appeared. Everything was silver and had a shadow. The trees were shedding their bark in long strips, and these hung like hair down the long, straight, thin necks. Oh, oh, it was astounding. They were like my father’s ghosts. I looked straight up into the nets the treetops spread. The stars winked through steam and leaves, sly and quiet.

This was the world and I was out in it.

“Here is the freedom, Strange Daughter, that you have longed for,” the world said to me.

“Thank you,” I replied.

The men filled my cup. I became a firefly, lighting in and out of the conversation, there and not there. I smiled into the darkness. My father would not live forever, even though he wanted to, even though he prayed every day that he be allowed to. Why should he be? I did not wish for his death. But I wished for a life that would stretch beyond his. Was that so wrong? I wished for my own life. That night, I saw it winking, almost within reach.

J
UHACHI-YA SLEPT ONLY A FEW HOURS
and packed up at dawn. A soft rain was soaking the bamboo. Its golden tassels leaned out from secret centres. We moved down through the narrow river valley, reaching a one-street village lit by red lanterns at dusk. A mist hung over Tsumago, caught on the top of the hill. But the sky was lifting: it would clear. I went to a roadside shrine and purified myself. I prayed thankfulness for this beauty. I prayed forgiveness for thinking of my father’s death. He would be impatient to put me to work.

When we arrived at last in a dusty cloud at Obuse, Juhachi-ya put me down first and then unloaded the rest of the bundles in front of Takai Kozan’s storehouse. The women took Tachi off, making a fuss over her. My father came to greet me. He looked older, bent and wizened. “Oei, Oei,” he called, as if I were a long way away.

I took his hands. They were cold.

“Hey, hey, Old Man. How about it?” I said.

“I ya’ ya’ yaaam g-g-goood,” he said. “Bu-bu-but I fell off th’ la-aa-aader.”

It was what I had feared. His palsy was back.

40

Obuse

I SQUATTED BY THE LITTLE GUTTER
of running water. I dished up several cups of it and then rocked back on my heels. The town was on a flat plain with an orchard. White mountain peaks stood up all around—an orange glow came off them as the sun rose. Steam rose from the little stream, and there was a thin edge of white on the grasses. Yet the afternoon would be hot. There was a rumble of wooden barrels from the direction of the sake factory.

Hokusai had perhaps died and gone to heaven and arranged for me to join him. Tachi had been met with kindness and had full days flying kites with other children. We had a little house a short distance from Kozan’s studio with this running gutter beside it. He had taken on a big job, painting the ceilings for two carts for O-bon, the Festival of the Dead. He had made a fine design of waves. But his eyes were not sharp, he was too weak, and now he was stumbling with the palsy. Grinding up the pigments was hard work, and he was not used to it.

The waves were choked up in wooden frames.

“Those are different to the waves at Uraga,” I said to him. “They will be very difficult to run through,” I joked, teasing him. “If you lie down at the edge of the sea, you will be tossed in amongst them.”

He grunted. “A-a-angry wa-waves,” he admitted. “Crowd of them.”

In one of the panels the waves went around in circles. In another they were heading straight up, as if to swallow the viewer.

We named those Masculine Waves. We named Feminine Waves the ones that tended inward. We worked and we laughed together. Or I laughed and he gave his bizarre, twisted barks. I was happy that he recognized two energies, the female and the male. I felt that he was telling me he knew me, deeply, as an artist.

Kozan himself painted the frames. He put angels in them in the Western style.

Sometimes in the evening we visited Kozan in his studio. He played the three-string koto looking out the second-floor window. From here we could see the estate, the neat, narrow passageways between warehouses, the tousled fields, and the road. We could see the pine trees tied up with their triangles of rope so the branches would not bend. If anyone came along that road, we would see them before they saw us.

The room also had a secret door. The door was hidden inside a cabinet and led to a secret staircase to the outside. He could escape unseen, if necessary.

I looked into the faraway mountains, marvelling that I had come through them. Like the glass prisms in Western books, they shattered the light, becoming transparent against the bright slabs of sky.

W
hen it got dark, Kozan lit the small lantern and showed us his books. They were written in Dutch, but there were pictures. Some were of guns—long and short, large and small. For sure we would be punished for seeing these things. I was more interested in the box that made pictures, called a camera. Kozan took pleasure in my amazement.

I had the quiet, those days up in the mountains, to consider myself. I was content in myself. I had no longing. And strangely, men had changed in their attitude towards me. They saw something they liked in my face, my figure. They respected me. There was something tentative, even careful, in their treatment of me. Maybe I had changed. I had aged well. My strong bones gave me the look, now, of a woman who had once been, if not beautiful at least of interest. Little did they know!

Another wealthy patron by the name of Sakai came from Matsumoto. This man’s home was here in the mountains, but he had a shop in Edo near the bridge to the Shogun’s castle. He had many prints by Hokusai, including all forty-six views of Mt. Fuji. But meeting Hokusai was not the purpose of his visit, I could see. It was a pretext. A certain nervous excitement was in the air, and I knew the men spoke about politics. Sakai was a sympathizer with the forces that wanted to open Japan to the world.

W
E FINISHED THE WAVES
. I began to make the deep red we needed for our new project, the ceiling of a temple outside of town. We were also writing a manual about colour, which my father wished to have published, perhaps to lay a claim to these techniques in the face of any imitator who might follow.

A shy boy approached. This was Iwajiro, second son of Koyama, the rice merchant and miso-maker, owner of Juhachi-ya, a well-off citizen of the town. He wished to learn painting.

I agreed to teach him, and we met often. One day I went as usual to his house. The young man showed some talent. I corrected his grip and the pressure of his fingers on the brush, and set the number of repetitions he was to make of a bamboo branch. As he worked I looked through the openings in the screens towards the centre of the town.

Two samurai rode in the gates. They dismounted and handed off their horses and, passing very near to where I stood watching, disappeared into Kozan’s studio. One was Sakai, the collector from Matsumoto. The other seemed to know his way in the little town.

“Who is that man?” I said to Iwajiro.

He looked up.

“That’s Kozan’s teacher, Shozan Sakuma.”

I was impressed, and frightened. I knew about Shozan Sakuma. He was a learned man, a rangaku-sha. But he was dangerous. He had a school in Edo and spoke against the isolationist policies of the bakufu. He wanted a state where our spiritual knowledge combined with Western practical knowledge.

They left a lookout who scanned every direction, turning and turning like a windmill. Hours later they emerged, with Kozan, who saw them off, clapping their backs and wearing a pleased and secretive look.

“Old Man,” I chided my father when I got home, “you are a sneaky old thing. Here I thought you had a peaceful mountain refuge. Now I discover that this little town is a nest of enemies of the Shogun.”

He smirked and kept on drawing his demon-quelling lions.

“You side with the rebels. And you never admit it. You are afraid it will limit you as an artist. I know you.”

He only laughed. He had no sense of danger, and he felt no responsibility to tell me when he led me into it. When he was playing around, he made a stamp with the sign meaning “one hundred”—the age he wished to be, but not the highest age he wished ever to be. He hadn’t even begun to use that yet.

“Old Man, you think you are so powerful. You think that by saying a thing is true, you can make it become true.”

But there were other times when, in the abrupt darkness that came as the sun disappeared behind the mountains, he admitted the day would come when he was gone.

“Chin-Chin, wha’ w’ you do wh-when the Ol’ Man’s gone?”