The Ghost Brush (115 page)

I made pictures of shells and spiny creatures, a picture of a schoolroom—children working on figures on the floor, learning to write the characters. A large standing abacus to one side. And in front, with his back turned, a sleeping bald man—ah, the teacher!

I drew the steps in making sakura cookies: four women picking cherry blossoms off a branch and saving them on a cloth. Another leaning with both hands on a big rolling pin that has a lump of dough wrapped around it. It was a beautiful scene, more beautiful than such a handbook deserved.

In small frames, usually at the top of the page, I made icons for trees, mountains, ferns, scrolls. Lanterns, butterflies, hills, holly, birds in flight, a flute, wooden clappers, a kitten with a ball of wool, pine needles. Grasses, tree trunks, a thatched pavilion.

Along the frame I drew crowds in little shops, bolts of fabric piled one on top of another, men displaying the fabrics, women choosing. Diagrams: how to fold paper, the latest way to tie the obi. I had never had the slightest interest in these feminine accomplishments. But I was good at “small,” and they were fun to draw.

I drew a temple. I put candlesticks on tall stands and, along the roof beams, bits of folded paper, hanging. Women with long hair, a thick wall of it hanging past their knees, tied only once, at the waist, in the nobles’ style. Another sunk into a deep bow with her fan to her face. The deities were at the top of the frame, floating in clouds.

I drew the game of incense identification. A woman poured a bit of scent on each of several handkerchiefs. She came before her lover, who was relaxing on his futon, knelt with the handkerchiefs and wafted them past his face. She let her sleeve fall open so part of the fragrance he caught was her own. Lily or rose petals or pine boughs in the snow or almond blossom.

I thought of other scents: behind the brothels in the Hour of the Snake; in mid-morning the stench of vomit and night waste; the remains of a feast fought over by dogs.

Or the smell of age, the smell of my father wasting on his cot. The smell of his clothing, the smell of our room, of cat piss and confinement, of stale food wrappers.

G
usts of wind knocked the dry leaves off their perches and sent them protesting against the thin wooden walls and screens. I felt closed and heavy and motionless, like a stone in the bottom of a river.

Yet I found a kind of peace illustrating that manual. Nostalgia filled me and rose like a net billowing overhead. Women’s lives: wonderful and terrible. And mostly strange to me. Yes, at one time I had a husband. I remembered the dull workings of his brush. “You’re beautiful,” he had said to me once. “You could just relax for a while and be beautiful.”

My father thought me ugly. But I wondered why I had taken his opinion and not the opinion of my husband, who may have been a fool but loved me.

Other women had children: I was barren. Unlike Shino, who had earned her barrenness in the Yoshiwara, I came to this state naturally. The gods had seen to that, and I was grateful.

I drew the life cycle of an egg. First a sphere with two circles within, then an egg shape, then that egg shape with separations as head and two legs began to sever their shapes from the egg. Then there were five: head, arm, arm, leg, leg. A curious leaf-shaped or star-shaped figure. Then this figure stretched out more, head, arm arm, leg leg, and trunk. On the next page I would at last show that it was a boy with a full head of black hair, standing on two legs.

Babies became children. Those could be nice. Or not. I had painted them for the Dutch doctor. I had Tachi; she came to me. Mothers, sisters, another joy of women. I had no one left. Even Shino was gone. I drew a mendicant nun with her bowl.

In one final sketch nearly at the end of the book, I had some fun.

Two gardeners, one leaning over his shovel, the other pouring water from his wooden ladle out of his wooden bucket, were planting cherry trees on Nakanocho Boulevard. Their legs were knotted and their buttocks bare with a strip of cloth between them. A young woman leaned out a windowsill above, flirting. Not recommended behaviour.

I completed the commission. The book was printed in large quantities. It was a success. Everyone spoke of its beauty. My name was on it, and my signature. I was almost famous, and we ate well for a time.

42

New Year’s, 1849

SOMETIMES THE OLD MAN
was almost as he had been.

Hokusai got up off his mattress, his blanket in his fist, his eyes big with wonder at yet another day given.

“Greetings on the last day of the year,” he said. “Where is my shochu?”

“You know where your shochu is.”

Not wanting to stop my brush, I jerked my hand towards the jug. He gave me a sidelong, low-lidded look, sticking out his scrawny neck like a turtle, and went to get the ladle. Dipped it, filled it, drank two ladles one after another. His eyes watered, and I could practically see fumes coming up his throat.

“Is there breakfast?”

“I went to the stall and got a pork dumpling,” I said, somewhat grudgingly. “He boiled one just for me.”

“What is that you are doing?”

“Twilight at the green houses,” I said. “The women on display in the latticed verandah. The men looking in.”

He looked at my paper. “Affecting.”

He burped up more fumes, went to the door, slid it open, and looked out. With his bandy legs apart he held on to a buttock cheek with each hand and squeezed. He forced air between his buttocks so that it rattled. And he laughed.

“Perhaps in this new year, I may die.”

This dying talk was an idle threat. Hokusai did not wish to die.

“Death will cut into your drawing time. How is your leg?” I said. He was rubbing the side of his hip. When I asked, he stopped.

“I think I will go up to the mountains again and see Kozan.”

“There you go, making promises you won’t keep,” I joked. But as I said it, I felt sad. He would never go there again. He attributed his weakness to the storm in Obuse, the return of the lightning. “I was paralyzed,” he often said. But this time he could not walk it off. His Chinese herbs and exorcisms, in the form of paintings, had no more effect.

“I tell you, King Emma of Hades has built himself a little house in the country. He wants me to do a little scroll painting for him. Remember, Daughter, when they carry me away, to put my drawing materials with me!”

He looked at me so sharply I knew he was serious.

“I won’t.”

The fierceness left his face and he was immediately joking again.

“I expect I’ll have a nice little place on Inferno Road. Happy to see you if you pass that way!”

“You may go to hell, Old Man,” I said, “but you won’t stay there long. You’ve never stayed anywhere long.”

He came back in and folded himself on the tatami beside me. I braced for the inevitable end-of-year discussion.

“Dear Father, today is the day we dread. The day we try not to imagine. But it has come. It’s time to pay our bills.”

“Why do you bother me about money, Ei?” He gave me a look that said it was all beneath him.

He shifted over onto his knees and elbows. His bottom end was now up in the air. He picked up a brush and pulled a roll of rice paper out from under my stack. I noted with irritation that he was now painting while my brush was idle.

“Unfortunately, those who must pay us are not so numerous.”

“That is likely true,” he mused, almost in spite of himself.

“Perhaps the publisher has money for me from the sales of the Illustrated Manual for Women.”

“When did I make that?”

“You didn’t. I made it.”

“Ah, yes. I recall it. The one that shows the correct way for women to behave on every occasion in life. As if you would know!” He cackled into his chest.

“I didn’t say I made the rules. I only drew the pictures,” I said testily.

“Ah.”

All of a sudden his brush, which had been poised—perfectly, ominously poised—woke up and darted back and forth, circling, spitting, on the surface of his paper in a burst of furious energy.

“And of daily exorcisms? What are we owed for them?”

“But you threw them in the street, don’t you remember?”

T
HINGS WORSENED IN OUR COUNTRY.
Foreigners were circling without, and within the battle between Western-leaning samurai and those who wished to keep us closed accelerated. One of the porters from Juhachi-ya came to our home. He bowed to the floor in the doorway. I had become careless of my appearance; I must have appeared mad. My father’s battle to live or to die had left signs of scuffle in me.

“He speaks only rarely,” I said. I didn’t want other people to hear how badly he slurred and stuttered.

“It’s you I’ve come to see. We’re going back to the mountains. The business is bankrupt. This is our last trip. We will take you if you wish. The gods are against us. Edo will burn again, burn to the ground. There will be robbings and killings. It will not be safe, miss.”

I rolled up eighty-six sketches that I had rescued and hidden after Hokusai threw them out. I had to be secretive because it made him angry. He believed it to be part of the efficacy of the charm to throw them away. Now he believed them sold.

“Take these to Kozan. It is all we have.”

The porter left.

Silence. The brush again: furious, jabbing, delicate, twisting, splayed—then still. I hated to be cross with him. I hated to remind him he was not powerful anymore. We love the arrogance of the strong and hold it dear no matter how it crushes us. I could not bear to see him humbled; I would rather humble myself. I would rather live under his mad regime.

“No more for the festival cart ceilings, then?”

“Last year.”

He lifted a bony buttock cheek and farted again.

“There was the St. Nichiren . . .” he began.

He was right. There was one. He had painted it for the temple. And a strange painting it was. St. Nichiren sat on a cloud and beneath him in rows cringed a hundred balding believers. A dragon’s scaly tail circled under the saint, but he was too busy reading his scroll to notice.

I was excited for a minute. “You’re right. We never saw any pay for that picture.”

“I could not ask. The temple.”

“No.”

“But someone may come.”

“Yes, someone may be sent. Is there any more?”

“Did you sell dolls?”

“When I did I took the money and we spent it on food.”

And that was it: our tally.

“What do we owe?”

“The largest amount to the temple for the rent of this room. The second-largest to the vendor for our food. The third—”

“The third to the drinking house,” he said. “I never go there. You do.”

“I buy your shochu.”

“And are we ahead or behind?”

“We are behind, Father. You must know that.”

He brightened. “We could move on.”

I knew he would say that. I had tried at the time of the last move to make a list of our living places, got to the number ninety-three, and stopped.

“What is this? One hundred views of Edo?” I asked. “One hundred filthy lodgings? No, Old Man. I won’t move again. It is enough. Three times last year! The paintings to pack. Our bedding. The pot and teacups.”

“I don’t know why we have that pot. We never use it.”

True again. I fell silent.

“We like our rented houses, do we not?”

“I don’t.”

He looked mortally wounded.

“You don’t? But it is our way.”

“I’m tired of our way.”

“Then you would stay behind?”

Was he really suggesting he move off by himself? “No, Old Man, of course I wouldn’t.”

“Then good. Let’s go.”

It was an obsession with him. Our houses, like so many sketches for a final work, like so many lotus-leaf food wrappers, used and discarded. Such restlessness! Running from the censors. Running from Monster Boy. Running from the bakufu because we were labelled as lovers of the West. Running from time and age. No more running for me.

I pretended to be lazy. I yawned. “It all seems like such a bother. Why not just stay here?”

A picture was beginning to grow under his brush. He was painting the tiger again. All last year he painted tigers, in rain, in snow. Their paws were soft, their bodies powerful but muted somehow, turned upon themselves, as if they did not know which way to go with all that energy. But his hand shook and his brush fell to the mat.

“If we just owned our little house,” I began. I don’t know why I bothered.

“Chin-Chin!” he cried in frustration. “There are none but rented houses in this world. Why should we try to keep one? Our true home is north, at the North Star. If we kept a home on earth, we would only have to give it back. We rent the house of this body, do we not?”

This was Hokusai in his pious mood.