The Ghost Brush (78 page)

“I care about respect.”

“You cannot eat respect.”

“Yes, I can.”

He popped his eyes, sat with knees high and feet crossed, slurped and burped and rubbed his stomach. I fell into a giggling heap. My older sisters hated him for teasing my mother. She began to moan. My younger brother sat staunch with his eyes on the pathetic little fire in our hearth. Sakujiro was so quiet. My mother slung him around from hip to hip like a bag of rice. He was a mystery to us all. But I suspected he was not stupid.

“See, Wife, that’s your problem: you can’t laugh.”

“Laugh?” my mother shouted. “No, but I can cry.”

That made an end to it for an hour or two. But then he asked her to serve him an empty bowl at dinner, and she did. He sat with his chopsticks, lifting his invisible dinner to his lips, smiling and winking at me, the accomplice.

“Your hunger may be in your big head, but you can’t pull off your magic with me,” said my mother. “Mine is in my belly.”

It was simple: Hokusai lived on invisible things, the good as well as the bad. It was an unfair fight, I knew that. He had a genius for taunting. He used words nearly as well as he used a brush. He was an actor. His ghost stories went to bed with me and his jokes woke me up. I understood the Old Man; my mother didn’t.

I felt superior to her. My father and I both did.

That night we went to the Yoshiwara, hoping for a glimpse of Shino.

The next day it began again.

“Your daughters are cold because we have no coal for the fire. Your son . . .” She pointed to the boy. He was poking the fire with a little stick, expressionless. He was a spooky kid, I admit. Even she had no words for him. “You paint all the beautiful ladies who are for sale, while I, your virtuous wife, have only one kimono—”

“Oh, this is tiresome, tiresome,” he said. He had been up all night. He spoke quietly while bent over a sketch. “For the sake of argument let’s call this misery. What I am saying is that I prefer misery to humiliation.”

“Why?” she said. “Humiliation is nothing to me. Humiliation is a mosquito to be waved away. Misery is in the bones.”

“Your ideas are from the old times, from the peasant times, the distant past,” charged Hokusai. “You have no pride. Pride is in the spirit; where is yours?”

But later, when they lay on their mat and were lovers again, he spoke tenderly. He rolled her frontward and back again, like a package, to get free of her wrapping. He propped her on her knees and knelt behind her. “Do it this way and you’ll be in the pictures,” he said. “Isn’t that what you want?”

“It is not the laughing pictures I want to be in!”

“But I can teach you.” He laughed and she cried. Then she wheedled. I was young, but I had heard many women wheedle.

“Tell me, Husband, don’t you wish you had taken the
150
ryo?”

Shino would never have said that.

T
HE NEXT DAY, LO AND BEHOLD
, Captain Hemmy and his Japanese escort appeared at our door again. I was sent out to tell their translator that my father was too busy to see him.

“I understand,” he said. “But we are very patient.”

They sat by the door all day. When evening came I admitted the translator. He bowed very low and asked forgiveness for suspecting Hokusai of making a copy. Captain Hemmy had reconsidered. He would like to have his scrolls and he had brought the money.

My father didn’t want to sell, I knew. But my mother’s sheer volume had made an impression. “You will have to inspect the studio books,” he said to me, “to see if the scrolls are still available.”

I went to the other room and played with the cats for a long time, and then I brought the scrolls to where the translator waited and so it was done. We paid our debts and my mother was happy for a time, and when he laughed, she laughed as well.

Later the news came that Captain Hemmy had died on the long journey back to Nagasaki.

“Oooh! Do you see? Do you see what happened? I told you so!” said Hokusai. And oohed and aahed. “Do you see? I told you he was full of an evil spirit. It overcame him, and he is gone. Probably he had an imbalance of the four grains. He was filled with bile. Even the Western medicine could not save him.”

Hokusai prayed, he chanted, he took his Chinese herbs and breathed incense. He wanted to expunge the Dutch captain.

I sometimes wondered what happened to the scrolls Hemmy bought when he died. No one knew. Maybe they travelled to Europe with one of his party. Perhaps they were sold there and started the fame that would make our life a little easier, before it made it much more difficult.

15

The Waves

NOW IT WAS FOUR YEARS
after our first encounter with the Dutch. We sat by the side of the Tokaido, amongst the peasants and noodle sellers. We had decided to wait to see the barbarians again. Hokusai sketched. I had a brush myself, which I used to practise characters. By the time the noodles were cooked, the procession had appeared. At first it was a cloud of dust, far down the road. Then it was noise—drums, whips, neighing of the horses. We were supposed to kneel and bow, but my father wouldn’t, so instead we moved back from the road into the rushes.

Two policemen were at the head of the procession. Behind them, oxen crawled and horses cantered. The drivers shouted. The porters trailed along like bent hooks under tubs of foodstuffs and a cookstove. Then came a giant black piece of furniture, borne aloft on men’s shoulders. It was covered with a red cloth written on in gold: this was their counting house.

The bearers stopped. The palanquins jolted to a stop with the curtains open. The barbarians’ heads poked out; two of them climbed down to see what blocked the road. They were very tall and dressed in heavy black coats with hats like stovepipes. Their skin was pasty white, and copper hair hung from their chins and grew under their noses. Their eyes were cool and lit from within, like the eyes of wolves.

They opened their baskets of linen and their cooking pots, and they set up their bizarre furniture, tables and chairs. The bearers began to prepare tea. A lacquered black sedan chair shook and out of it came their leader, like a tall puppet. He sat for his red devil meal of tea and cakes while the doctor began to look at the sick babies and old women.

My father approached. The translator glanced down at him: a peasant, dusty, on the road with other peasants.

“I have a question. Your scientists say that the world is round. Is it true?”

“Yes, it is true. We have sailed all around it in our ships.”

My father had many more questions, and finally three barbarians spoke to him and showed him the instruments they aimed at the sky. The moon was round; he could see that. Maybe everything was round. But if it was, then what about straight lines? Where did they come from? And how about the directions to the stars? Did those directions change when you were in a different place in the world? Was the sky possibly round as well? It would change everything.

The answers did not convince him, but Hokusai thanked the Dutch and told me we had to hurry on. It was getting dark.

He explained it all to me when we found a teahouse that would take us in.

“If this is true,” he said, “there can be no straight lines.”

I didn’t believe it. Straight lines were everywhere. You just had to look.

“We will find out for ourselves. We are going to the horizon. We’ll see if it is curved.”

U
RAGA WAS A SMALL FISHING VILLAGE
under a cliff, with sand shores. We had come out of the long bay that led to Edo. Now we looked out to the open sea. We walked to the far end of the shore, where there were some fishing huts. No one lived in these huts anymore; only a few old men and women walked the beaches with their eel spikes.

“I am Tokitaro of the family Nakajima,” said my father to one of them. They welcomed us. In one of their huts we put our bundles. My father sat on the beach and stared out at the sea, which he had told me was a great beast.

“What are you looking for?” I asked. There were no boats coming in, and none going out. Only the waves and the far horizon.

“Do you see that line? Where the water ends and the sky begins?”

“Yes.”

“That is the edge of the world. If the world is round,” he said, “that line must be curved, not flat. Tell me what you see.”

I looked at it very carefully. “It is a straight line.”

“You are wrong,” he said. “It is round, but it is very, very large—so large that it looks straight to us,” said Hokusai. “But it is a curve that is very wide. We are not far enough away from it to see the curve, not here.”

“We can’t get any farther away,” I said.

“Then we will have to change the way we see.”

H
okusai wanted to paint the waves. He sat for a long time trying to catch them at the right moment. But they moved too fast and were always dissolving in front of us.

“Nobody paints these things,” I said. “Paintings have people in them.”

“Yes, they have, but they don’t always need to.”

“Oh,” I said. I could see that he was planning more changes.

He was. He would make the people along the shore tiny, and that would show that the waves were big. He had the people all ready. Along the way to Uraga he had sketched peddlers of pots, toys, and baskets with their wares. Now he copied them onto a drawing of the shore. He made tiny offshore waves that arched like cats. He added himself, the old man.

I was certain that it was not the kind of painting people wanted. I said, “Who wants to see just the water and an old woman carrying sticks in a pack on her back?”

T
here had been light in the sky, but night was falling. My father walked at the edge of the water. He turned and walked into the water, then he turned his back on it and towards me. He did this again and again, like a child, returning to safety and then going deeper and deeper each time.

I could see the lightness of his skin. I could see the white rim of water where it rose up. I could not see the water itself, because it was dark. But I heard it growl, the great beast. I was afraid of it, and of what it could do to my father. I tried running in it, but it sucked at my legs as if it would drag me down, and I jumped away.

He went deeper and the water picked him up and moved him. In the dark, it became invisible, but it still moved him along. I thought it might carry him away, and I began to whimper. My father had drifted. The foam was white or grey and occasionally came up and covered him.

A fishing boat appeared, coming in for the night. It came upon us suddenly, out of the dark. I imagined that the distance between me and the edge of the world was a scroll unrolling.

The boat appeared and then disappeared, rhythmically, as if in a dance. The men inside it were riding the invisible. Wind, or the pushing of the water, brought them in towards me. I watched to see where they would land, at the bottom of the scroll.

Foam swallowed my father time and again as the beast tossed. I stood on the sand. I thought that if I stood there at least he would come back to me. I moved back and forth along the shore, trying to be at his landing place when he finished his dance in the claws of the beast.

My father ran back and forth, echoing the motion of the boat as it rocked up and down on the waves, out far and high up. He ploughed with heavy feet, then was loosed and skipped, then turned as if he carried weights, then pushed sideways as if he had to push crowds out of the way to get where he was going. The water was black paper. He was the brush. His strokes were making a figure. What was he drawing?

I watched a long time. He drew many characters with his body. He stopped and started as if moving to music. He strove to remain erect. He strove to stay above the waves. His body used every muscle to articulate itself. It came to me that he was drawing his path. Perhaps it was his message to me.

But I couldn’t read it.

I called out to him, “Old Man, come back.” He did not answer. I even wheedled: “Old Man, I can make you some nice tea . . .” The water made him deaf. “Hey, you! Get the hell back here!” I tried. “You ugly thing!” Nothing.

I will remember this forever, I thought. I had no idea what forever would be. I did not know what my life would be, but standing there behind my father as he danced with the waves, I knew that I would always watch him tumble, would always think the ground underneath me tumbled just as the waves did. I would never trust that solid ground. I would face the tumult, scanning for the shadow man I loved. I was his child, but he was mine too.

We grew up early in my time. We learned about sex and the women who sold themselves in the Yoshiwara.

We were with the men in the studio when they painted the erotic prints. All those pictures of couples grappling, of women forced down to the mat—as if we didn’t hear it at night too, in our houses.

We knew about the hardness of life. I took charge of the money when my father couldn’t or wouldn’t. I heard my mother saying the words that would make him stop loving her. But that wasn’t the moment that turned me from a child to an adult. It was that day, in the waves. Me hollering after him like a mother.