The Ghost Brush (119 page)

Now the curator spread out the painting A Fisherman’s Family.

This one Hokusai started. The fisherman and his wife sat on their mat by the shore, mending their nets next to an enormous anchor. The five children played on its giant claws, swinging upside down, perching topmast and gazing at birds, balancing on the beam of it.

It was to be him at his amusing, busy best.

But that had been one day. The next he was down on the mattress. He could only stagger when he stood, and that made him angry, so he went on strike. “N-n-no more wor’,” he slurred at me, “’Kay.” He made his final consonant with teeth bared at me and jabbed his finger at the shochu jar in the corner.

“It doesn’t help,” I said, pouring him some.

“My ow’ r-r-rem’dy,” he countered.

“But these are due.” I hardly dared stand up to him. I said it mildly, not looking directly in his eyes.

“Y-y-y—” he managed, smacking his lips on the potato liquor.

“I can’t do this one. This is not a Beauty. This is not what I do,” I said, primly, I’m sure. We all have our pride, even me. “And anyway,” I coaxed, “don’t you want to send your pictures off with the Dutch doctor?”

“Y-you can do it. H-h-he’s be f-f-fooled.”

His condition was a secret—my secret, evidently. I took the pigment, my own dark crimson for the anchor, touching it to the Dutch paper and letting it soak and soak into the smooth, giant hooks, making them blood red. I dallied over it, loving the depth of the colour. I must have because now I see that this colour, and this alone, has escaped the softening influence of years and foreign paper and remained brilliant.

The lively children became, under my hand, little statues with perfectly articulated hands and feet. The fisherman himself wasn’t too bad. He retained his slouch and the tendons in his arms as he reached up to the hanging net. His wife with her waxed thread was no trouble. My father had drawn a sixth figure, a bald man, dead centre on the page, with his boat propped up at an angle and a little fiery torch under it, mending a crack with pitch. Himself, of course.

R
ebecca scrutinized the painting. “I wonder if she did the woman. It looks like her . . . The man’s body has that fantasy look of a Hokusai character . . . The fuzzy hair on the children’s heads is very, very fine. Only she had that amount of patience . . . He was comic; she was not.” On she chattered. The assistant murmured assent from time to time.

“If I were painting for a foreigner when it was too dangerous to sign, I’d be tempted to put my mark,” Rebecca mused. “Where is her mark?”

She looked at the hands. The wife’s hand was turned down, palm to the viewer, as if it were a face, catching her eye. And there it was again, the long, tapered finger and the plump “heel” of the thumb.

She laughed. “Look at that. It’s as if Oei is beckoning. You know what I’m doing, I assume,” she said to the assistant. “I’m writing about Oei.”

“Yes, I know.”

“Wondering if she did any of this work, especially as it’s not signed.”

The assistant said that she herself had always assumed “the daughter” did do these pictures. Ever since she came to work here, that was what she had heard.

She had heard?

I
had become a curl of steam in the corner. So much so that the preservationist who was mending one of the storage cases noticed the changing humidity. He blamed it on the snow that was blowing through the open spaces beyond the shaded windows and went back to work.

I was overwhelmed. It is so strange to be recognized. I had wanted it, but now I wanted to flee. I wanted to be gone, but I could not leave her. These were my lost pictures. Pictures that had gone out into the world. For many years we were frightened that they would bring our doom. But here they were, safe in their careful boxes. One hundred and fifty years later, but I was seeing them.

And so was Rebecca.

Added to my own critical eye was her sympathetic one. We heard what the assistant said! So this was the word on the Dutch paintings? That the daughter did them?

I shrank. It is painful to be known. Who was it who first understood these were by me and not my father? Was it Phillip himself? I wished that were true. That he had come back to Holland and told people, and that it was a “collective memory”—as Rebecca would say.

The assistant reached for two wooden scroll boxes. The scrolls were inside, wrapped in paper, rolled perfectly straight. They had been put on new wooden rollers. She unrolled the first. It was Courtesan Looking in a Mirror.

Beautiful, but a disappointment. Not Oei. Not Hokusai either. A student of ours. I couldn’t remember who. The woman was tall and slim. There were jagged lines on the fabrics. Her right shoulder was too big and too low, and her hand was out of proportion, too. There was extremely fine work on her hairline, both in and out of the mirror, but she did not have that gloss of perfection that a figure of a woman by Oei would have. Her fingers were not good, not my fingers.

“Next?”

“Yes, please.”

The next was Promenading Courtesan.

Rebecca went speechless.

I too. So my darling child courtesan had survived the wrecking of the ship in Nagasaki harbour and the ransacking of von Siebold’s collection by the bakufu. She had survived the long sail to Europe. And here she was. My gift for him.

The young prostitute was enfolded in a giant, puffy brown-and-blue kimono. With one childish hand she raised the front of the great shell to reveal a slit and, inside, a red frilled underskirt. Her hair was a two-tiered black beehive speared with heavy ornate pins. Her platform clogs twisted as she stepped. You could hardly say she was walking. She dangled in the air like an ornament. There was nothing beneath her, nothing in front. Alone, suspended in the yellow atmosphere of the aged silk scroll, she could have been treading water. But she was a little below the surface; her blank white face was tilted down and towards the viewer, and her features—eyes, nose, mouth drawn with fine brush lines—were closed.

Even I was proud. And awed somehow. How passionate I had been. How filled with truth.

Rebecca breathed. “That is a masterpiece. Oei at her best.”

She gazed at it for fully three minutes.

“I wish she could tell us about it.”

I
tell.

The girl—sixteen—was for sale. Her “parade” was a way of advertising herself as goods. Her runway was Nakanocho Boulevard in the Yoshiwara. She was performing the figure-eight step, which required her to lift each foot, swing it forward and then out in a semicircle, circle it back to its starting position, and then forward again before putting it down. She was being careful, but her feet appeared to be at cross-purposes and put her in danger of falling. This twilight promenade took place before shoppers in the pleasure district. It’s obvious whose pleasure we’re talking about, and it is not hers.

I covered the fabric of the girl’s outer kimono with large circles of white and black—bull’s eyes—as if great, staring eyes had flown at her and stuck on. The frilled edges of her red underwear ran like lightning under the swirls of fabric. She probably can’t see over her giant front-tied obi. She walked in a welter of pride and shame.

And I had made her for the Dutch doctor, so he would understand me, and perhaps—just perhaps—he had.

Rebecca went to the coffee shop as soon as she left the assistant. She wrote:

Oei’s signature is colour. Depth and intensity of colour, and centeredness; it is a vortex that goes around and down and in. Differences to Hokusai: His women are elongated; hers are chunky. Her figures are still and stiff, with agile, flexible fingers. Their fingers have all the freedom that their bodies do not. Hokusai’s figures are always swaying, moving, but their hands and feet are awkward. His paintings aren’t centered; they’re all over the page. They’re amusing and on the surface. His are comic, hers are intense. They show a huge compassion for women . . .

T
IME TO GET OUT OF LEIDEN
. Snow was blowing on a slant. Bikes slipped on the bricks. The bare trees were stoic and the flower bulbs had gone underground. The tropical plants were shut up tight in heated glass houses.

She asked directions to the station as she paid her hotel bill. She thought she knew where she was going. It was only a few streets over. Her head was down and she was pulling her little suitcase. She was too involved in her thoughts to stop and ask again over which little humped bridge the station lay. She passed a pub wall with a poem by Shakespeare painted on it. Hey! Shakespeare, I thought. My old friend. Then she passed it again. This time she noticed.

She was back at the hotel.

There was von Siebold’s house across the canal. How strange that his work and his life should end in this quiet backwater. He biked along the canal here after being carried in his sedan through Edo. Perhaps it was then that he finally realized that Oei was the painter.

And he told the people at the museum when he made the gift, and it had been known—as the assistant said—but never written. Maybe that’s even why the pictures had never been exhibited in Holland.

Or did he keep the secret? He never named any of his collaborators in the map scandal. He was noble that way, and brave. Did he believe he had to protect the great man?

There were only two more bridges, and this time she had made the right turn.

46

Something Happened

LONDON IS COLD AND GLOOMY
, but it has beautiful names. Here’s one: Saffron Hill, near Farringdon Station.

This trip had nothing to do with Rebecca’s novel; she was in England with Andrew to celebrate his mother’s eighty-fifth birthday. But it just happened that while they were passing through, so was Professor Kobayashi, the expert on Hokusai and teacher of Kubota-san. John Carpenter and his partner, Peter, invited them for dinner and drinks, to meet him.

Kobayashi-sensei was a slim, silver-haired man whose face showed easy delight. He congratulated them with genuine emotion on the age of Andrew’s mother: “How fortunate! Such a great age!”

They sat around with drinks and nibbled olives. There were eight of them, including two graduate students from Oxford, both of whom were studying ukiyo-e and the artists who made them.

A
nd me. Lying on the pipes in the ceiling. I could see for miles into the turbulent skies and winding, cavernous roadways of the city. I loved London; it was Shakespeare’s city.

When they finished their drinks, they moved across the street to an Indonesian restaurant. At the long, rectangular table Rebecca sat at one end, near John and Kobayashi-sensei, while Andrew was at the other, talking to Peter. I was looking on hungrily when Andrew leaned behind the others and tapped Rebecca’s shoulder.

“She’s thirty-nine,” he said, or something like that, indicating the young female graduate student, who was Japanese, very poised, and spoke perfect English. Rebecca wondered why this was news.

“She doesn’t look it,” she said.

He laughed. She hadn’t heard. “No, no,” he whispered. “She’s third in line.”

Rebecca looked blank.

“To the Emperor. She’s his niece. Studying at Oxford.”

Oh.

“She has only one name. Just Akiko.”

Rebecca had spoken to Akiko over the olives. Now she rethought. Was she perhaps a little patronizing? “How long have you been in England?” “Have your parents come to visit?” She remembered that Akiko said her parents had been there; they’d studied at Oxford too. Rebecca wondered if Akiko minded when people had no clue. She decided the princess might enjoy a little anonymity.

I
gawked. How could I have missed it? Then I thought back—wasn’t there a certain untouched feeling about her? Wasn’t there a little superfluous respect, something indirect about the glances of the Japanese in the room towards this young woman? The Emperor’s family was studying the commoners’ “decadent”
ukiyo-e
? Then I began to giggle. Imagine me, in the presence of an imperial princess.

Rebecca turned back to her end of the table. They were talking about me. The lost woman painter of a bygone era. I was all ears.

Kobayashi-sensei said Hokusai relied on Oei for her depiction of humanity. He agreed that she had a special empathy for women. There was a particular beauty in her colours. Rebecca said she had found out as much possible about Oei’s life, up until
1849
, when Hokusai died. Then: dead end. Almost no trace. Disappeared without even a death notice. They discussed her strange fate—my strange fate—and the theories attached to my disappearance. Kobayashi-sensei said that she tried to live as “one brush” and failed. She died in Kanagawa or Kanazawa or Totsuka or Edo, by accident or pestilence or design, in
1857
or
1867
. Researchers had found no trace, no record of her death. It was a turbulent time. There was civil war between Western-leaning samurai and those who wanted to keep the country closed. Also, invasion of the “barbarians.”