The Ghost Brush (64 page)

And my black eyes did not close.

In years to come he did call me Ago-Ago, when he remembered, but most often he just called me.

“Hey, you. Come here!”

I
was born in a hard time.

We the townspeople led an unmarked existence. We had rights to nothing, only to witness the grand Shogun’s parade: the march of the doomed man to the Punishment Grounds, details of his crime painted on the placard he carried over his shoulder. We fed on brown rice and whispers of love suicides. The mouths of our actors were red gashes. We, the chonin, had one name—and no face.

In the years before my birth there was an artist called Sharaku. He made gargantuan faces with vast white, empty centres marked only with deep black lines for eyes and mouths spread in rage or fear or greed. But few people bought these pictures—they came too close to home, I think—and before long Sharaku and his work disappeared. Some people said he was a Noh actor and died of poisoning from the white face makeup. Other people said Sharaku was my father. They said that after this first failure he renamed himself and went on, and the proof that he had been Sharaku was that he never painted a big face again.

I don’t know if that was true. He told me much, but not that.

It was true about the faces, though: my father could draw anything that moved and much that didn’t—dancers, elephants, oarsmen, mountains, gods, and devils. Waterfalls and waves stopped for his brush. Fuji showed its one hundred moods. But he never made a face. Eyes, nose, and mouth—for him these were only a few short, sharp lines, and that was it. Maybe the gossip was true and he thought faces wouldn’t sell. Maybe he wanted distance from his past. Maybe he wanted distance from us all. Henceforth, to him, we had no faces, only burdened backs and sinewed buttocks, slim thighs and crinkled toes and dancing torsos.

Oh, but such bodies we had. Such glories were in them. They were our prized possessions. By these bodies, we were making ourselves into people. Before I was born we were not quite human, according to our masters. The bakufu—a tent government set up on a field of war two hundred years before—kept the Tokugawa Shogun in power. But as the eras passed, the bakufu remained. There were no wars; we didn’t fight with swords. We fought with words and pictures. Our pictures and our little storybooks cost pennies. But they had a strange power. They gave us news, gossip, celebrity, mementos. They celebrated the only pleasures we were allowed—kabuki theatre and love affairs and the small indulgences for our bodies.

The Tokugawa could not attack us directly; there were too many of us. Instead the enforcers attacked the messengers, our pictures; they called them decadent and tried to destroy them.

Think of all that clanking samurai power directed at these fragile sheets of paper. I want to laugh. Pictures and words don’t hurt anyone, except for those who are afraid of history. Rock, fire, scissors: these paper worlds go on.

The bakufu aimed their laws at our insubstantial world. There were to be no pictures of the Tokugawa. Any reference to how they came to rule was punishable by death. Famine and flood might ravage the country, but to note such calamities would be a criticism of the Shogun, who ruled celestial events as he did lesser beings. Therefore they were not to be noted.

We appeared to obey. We told ghost stories and repeated legends from times past, and went to plays about the love affairs of great courtesans. We put our faith in unnatural creatures, demons and gods and ghosts. Our gossip travelled through whispers and yellow-back novels. We sang and danced and devised outrageous dress. The bakufu bogeymen uttered ordinances and staged clampdowns. They did not stop us, but they kept trying. They were a constant backdrop to my life, from my first squalling complaints through my middle years until I was almost old enough not to care. Then, suddenly, they were gone. But that comes at the end of the story.

This is the beginning. The tiny tenement house. The mat on which we all lay, side by side; the soot-orange sun at dawn.

My birth was both lucky and unlucky. Lucky because I was born in the centre of this magic. First my father’s words defined me, and then his pictures did. And unlucky to be under the thumb of another, weightier, power. And a daughter. In that terrible time. Lucky and unlucky.

That is Ei’s story.

M
y first memory: I lay on my mat in the damp dark and the cold of whatever small room we shared. My father was working by the light of an oil lamp. Then he stood and blew it out. He opened the door to the night. White snow was emptying out of the heavens on us, thick as feathers. The snow erased the rooftops with its soft white brush, leaving only the thin, dark outline of tiles.

He lifted me in his arms and we went out to stand under the sky. We looked up. The snow fell straight down without fluttering, freighted, through the barren trees. There were no leaves to catch it. It melted on the lanterns: too warm. It fell around his feet and more snow followed. It blotted the ground, sopping up its colour, and then melted, making the packed earth gleam.

I lay in his arms, warm, with the cold, airy flakes landing on my eyes, my cheeks, and my lips. Tongue out, I tasted them. Laughed at the cold, and the warmth of him. How safe I felt! How loved! We were one being.

The snow was a gift. I licked my lips, where it tasted sweet. My father stared and sighed. I thought it was for happiness, for holding me. Now I know differently—he was puzzling how to catch it on the page—but then I was safe in illusion.

“What time is it?” my mother called.

“It is the Hour of the Rat,” he said. “The hour of romance.” Then he muttered under his breath, to me, “Or the hour of avoiding romance.” He sighed and looked up, searching for his favourite stars. But they were hidden.

Illusion is shaken, a little.

“Even a courtesan might delay awhile,” he said, “before necessity compels her to a client’s company. Examine herself in the mirror or tidy the empty glasses. But not for long: this is the hour. The hour of tyranny and love.”

What did he mean?

“Are you coming inside?” my mother called again.

Here my father laughed. I knew his laugh better than my own. It was a laugh not heartless but mirthless, a laugh that saw everything and presumed nothing. He was no romantic. He sucked at the hard tit of circumstances and made a game of it. He laughed as if he were a free man, and he laughed with rue because he wasn’t.

“Not yet! I hear the crier coming.”

“So what?” cawed my mother. “He’s not crying for you.”

We heard footsteps, footsteps slapping the wet stone. The crier rose out of nowhere with a hood on his head and ran through the streets, stopping on bridges to make his announcement, then covered his head again and ran on. He was a nameless runner for Kawara-ban, a small broadsheet that sometimes appeared. It was illegal: we were not allowed to know the news. So he ran at night, perhaps to alert us to famine in the north. Or rice riots in the south. Earthquake or fire at the other end of the roads, in Osaka or Kyoto. Arrests and sometimes deaths. Scandal about corrupt officials of the town. Some people said these stories were nothing but rumours and gossip. But we who watched the roadways into this huge city—the largest in the world—could confirm the disasters by the trail of starving peasants coming to Edo.

The Kawara-ban man came closer. I could see his dark form through the curtain of snow. I thought he must be afraid. But my father said no, he was not afraid. He was doing his job.

I know now that this was not true. Of course he was afraid. We were all afraid: fear was required of us. Failure to feel fear was an offence under the law. But some seemed not to be afraid. My father was one of these. He too did his job.

Now we could hear the crier’s voice. I understood the tone of the words but not their meaning.

“Look tomorrow! It will be posted. A new edict. New prohibitions. Artists and writers take care. Look tomorrow!”

My father held me more closely against his chest. He prayed. We went to bed.

D
aylight had come. A layer of white was on us and on every surface. It was beautiful. I scooped up light balls of it and pushed them into my mouth. We stood by the signboard and my father read aloud, stopping frequently for emphasis. A crowd of women, unable to read, formed around us.

Behold the Senior Councillor’s new edict. He speaks with the authority of the Shogun.

There have been books since times long past, and no more are necessary. Year after year people have applied themselves to useless tasks, including even picture books, and have obtained large fees for their products. This is thoroughly wasteful.

Newly published books will be regarded as strictly undesirable if they are depraved or a medley of unorthodox ideas.

Amorous books are not good for public morality.

Wicked children’s books ostensibly set in ancient times will be regarded as undesirable.

We will censor all matter intended for publication, including picture books, readers, and novels. The sign of the censor—in the form of a circular seal with the character
kiwame
—must be stamped onto the drawing for the print after inspection and then cut into the printing blocks.

Those pictures that do not pass the censors will be seized and burned. The blocks will be destroyed. Persons who disregard this order will be accused in court.

If the necessity to print a new book does arise, inquiries must be made at the City Commissioner’s office.

There will be no news reporting. You are reminded that this was decreed in earlier times. However, it continues. There will be no “true records” such as those that can be rented from lending libraries. These are baseless rumours and will be seized. The lending libraries will be closed.

“Blah, blah, blah,” said my father to the women. “Here we go. I’ll just get on to the end for you.”

They shifted and protested: they wanted to hear it all.

“I’m skipping all this part,” he said, pointing to columns of characters. “After this it degenerates into a harangue.”

The Senior Councillor repeats his determination and asserts the rightness of the Old Way. We are losing the distinction between the esteemed and the despised. You people desire to imitate your betters, and to raise yourselves. This must end. We will root out corruption and laxity, and enforce austerity and morality. We shall rid Japan of private interest, and the destructive powers of passion and desire.

That was the end. He turned around and made a deep theatrical bow. The people were caught between fear and laughter.

5

The Seven Stars

WHATEVER MY FATHER DID
, he did with a kind of double, lunging in but also holding back, as if he were his own shadow. He loved the crowd, but he also liked to stand aside, watching himself, the entertainer amongst us, remarking on how it looked. He saw himself eating or lying, making love. He was hugely amused by himself and all the rest of us. He was an artist first and last, an ordinary man rarely, in between.

That night he went inside, put me down, and lay beside my mother.

“What did the edict say?”

“No more pillow pictures. No more picture books. No more libraries.”

My mother shrieked and covered her head with a cloth.

“Be still, woman!” He yawned, as if it were not important. It made her hysterical.

For a time he had made his living painting calendars. He delineated the long months and the short months; they changed every year. But an edict had made it illegal for common people to own or sell such a calendar. Calendars could be issued only by licence of the Shogun; the Shogun alone was responsible for counting days and months, for celestial movement and changing seasons. He issued the only calendars that were allowed. Who could afford one of these official calendars? Only a lord or a lady.

But my father had not despaired. “A calendar is a handy thing. People want to know what day it is. It’s a good market, and we won’t give it up. There is a way.”

He began to make calendars that looked like simple pictures—a rooster or a chrysanthemum. Hidden inside the swirl of the flower petals or in the rooster’s feet were the characters giving the number of days. The townspeople would spot these and understand, and even enjoy the little game. The officials failed to notice, and we were saved, for a time.

But now it was books—picture books, storybooks, history books. Our mainstay.

My mother wept. “The bakufu have taken away the last thing. The last strand by which we cling to life . . .” She had her own dramatic flair.

“Just a moment!” said my father. This was a thing he often said. He had borrowed it from the kabuki stage. It created a dramatic pause, heralded a grand gesture. A wordless grimace and a moment to make strategy.

He jumped out of bed and pounced, legs and arms wide apart. He made us laugh. “We will make a new thing that he hasn’t thought to censor yet!”