The Ghost Brush (21 page)

I felt the cut. My sympathies, which were naturally with him, swung over to her. He who lived on respect gave her none. I had seen so many women bob around uselessly, trying to please men with foolish smiles, taking the low seat at dinner, walking paces behind. My mother had once tried; she did not like the result.

“A better one than those fools who call you an artist,” she sniffed. She fought with more cunning these days, having learned a deadlier style from him.

“You know-nothing daughter of the slums.”

Hokusai, who loved to call himself “a peasant of Honjo,” nonetheless taunted her with his suspect high birth. Sometimes I wondered where this man had sprung from. Humble roots or noble, or some unholy mixture? Was his father Nakajima? Had he truly been born from one of the descendants of the enemy in the case of the Forty-seven Ronin? Whack, whack went my heart from one to the other, like a shuttlecock swatted with a racquet, back and forth. Whack, whack. It made me dizzy.

Waterfalls and quiet dawns my mother had not seen herself, only heard talk of. Like everyone she was curious to see the wonders of our country and go to the ends of the national roads that crossed right here at Nihonbashi. I knew she hated her life of drudgery, which she often said was brought on by us children and of course her husband. I added to my “never marry” vow the determination never to have children.

With my father’s absence, I was abandoned. After her bitter announcement at the public bath, Shino had gone silent. I did not go to her brothel for fear of seeing the blind man. Had they married? Would they have children? Courtesans did not, usually. Something to do with the precautions they took when they were working, and certainly the abortions they had, made babies impossible. I was glad.

“Are you travelling alone?”

Hokusai smirked and said, “I left sketches and instructions for Mr. Kenma and Mr. Oburu to copy. You must supervise. Bohachi accompanies me.”

I argued. Mr. Bohachi was a student of the North Star Studio who had worked for the city government and was now retired. He was too old to work and had plenty of money to pay for lessons, but could he walk miles at my father’s speed? He was younger than Hokusai, who was over fifty-five years old now, but he would have no idea how fast or how far that old man walked. “You are jealous,” my father said. I was.

And so, they left. We daughters were to run the studio.

M
y sisters took my mother’s part in all quarrels, which was odd because they were born of Hokusai’s first wife. They were older, halfway in age between my mother and me. O-Miyo behaved like a cow, making big eyes and swinging her lowered head winningly towards her husband, Shigenobu, still present in the studio as a disciple—and a poor one!—of my father’s. And she indulged that son of hers, who had graduated from tormenting the cats to stealing neighbours’ food and laundry.

In the studio, chaos reigned while Hokusai was on the premises. His drawings piled up in the corners like dry leaves. The money he made was left in its little envelopes here and there: we never knew what happened to it. On the now quiet, now curiously flat days that followed my father’s departure Tatsu went through the piles of drifted paper in the corners, sorting the dried banana leaves that had wrapped sticky rice from the sketches of children playing with shuttlecocks and the brush paintings of ravens. Tatsu was hard-working and sensible. I liked her, but she tried to boss everyone and often succeeded. She was well organized. But this did not make her a talent, something she failed to understand. Meanwhile, younger brother Sakujiro continued his important education and my mother tended to him with something like love.

I finished work that was owing. I copied out sketches of trees—cedars with bushy branches going up; willows with thin, wispy ones trailing down. Odd, awkward drawings of women’s hands and feet. He never did those well. Did he forget that women had use of these tools? The thatch roofs of sentry houses. Waves and beaches. Seeing these curling, crawling water ghosts, I remembered how my father and I had played in them. My heart was broken that he had left me with the women.

If I stayed face down over my painting I escaped the worst of the chores—cooking and disposing of dirt. Youngest girl but older than the boy: it was a position from which one could abscond, disappear, and I did my best. Shopping was my forte, setting me free on the streets for an hour or two. I loved to walk, and to breathe the wind off the water. Occasionally I caught a glimpse of myself in a polished bronze shop mirror. I didn’t seem to be as ugly as they said. But who could tell what others saw? I modelled myself on the cats, which had no idea what they looked like but lived in their bodies with complete, insouciant pleasure. I sometimes even took the ferry up to the Yoshiwara, stopping to see Mitsu and Waki but never hearing a word about Shino. And I dared not ask.

My father took his time “on travels.” The leaves were blowing sideways out of their branches and the nights were cold when we heard he was back in the city.

“Like an animal to his den when the cold comes on,” my mother muttered with satisfaction. He had yet to darken our door. And he did not: we suffered the indignity of knowing he was back in the city for three nights before he appeared.

O
ne day his shadow landed on my paper. I felt his warmth over me in my cold corner. I began to trace his outline—the top of his head and the small bulges beside it that were his ears. Circles: everything is made of circles, he had told me. I crouched low over my paper and did not look up at him. I heard him laugh with pleasure. He nudged me in the back with his knees—our little signal of secret connection. I kept my eyes down so he couldn’t see my tears.

I had learned to make the characters for heaven and earth, and so I made them carefully, first one and then the other, with my brush and I could feel that he was pleased. “Where did you go? How did you return?”

“We walked one way the whole time—forward,” he said, smiling. “We never went backwards.” It was our joke.

“So is it true the world is round?”

“We didn’t get far enough to find out—we’ll try another time,” said the Old Man, and he and I cackled with laughter.

I
T WAS WINTER
. Cold but dry, the earth dead and hard as rocks. We needed money. My father went to Gokoku-ji, a temple on the edge of the town. He announced that he was going to paint an enormous picture. His disciples cleared a space in the centre of the square—seventy tatami mats by fifty. Tatsu and I were enlisted to push back the people to empty the square. In that space we pasted many sheets of paper together to make one enormous sheet. People stood around the edges gawking. Hokusai brought out a sake cask that was full of
sumi
ink. He had made a broom from hollow stems of the reeds that grew along the river. Lifting his enormous “brush” as if it were as heavy as an axe, pushing it along the paper like a street cleaner, Hokusai began to paint.

He made a circle, then he lifted and spattered the pigment. He made circles within circles, and straight lines next to curved lines. We knew he saw his subject in his mind’s eye, but we did not know what it was. From where we stood, there were only broad and broken lines.

He twirled the broom on its brushes and put a foot up behind him, dancing. The more people laughed, the more he twirled. I worked my way along the edge of the crowd as people shouted out their guesses.

“It’s the coastal highway. The black spots are the inns where you can have a waitress!”

“It’s the mountains to the north.”

Arguments broke out.

“No, it isn’t.”

“Yes, it is.”

“When did you ever see a mountain?”

“There—in the two lines that meet in a peak.”

“That’s not a mountain, it’s a roofline. No, it isn’t a roof—it’s a broken branch . . . it’s an eyebrow.”

People pushed, craning their necks, but from the flat ground, they could not see, any more than I could see, what my father could see in his mind. In the crowd were some of his artist friends. I also saw government spies, and I saw publishers. I saw the priests who commissioned altarpieces and lamps from us. They circled. But the drawing was too large to be read.

The first to climb to the temple roof were the firemen. They shimmied up the pillars and clambered on hands and knees over the roof tiles. Hokusai swooped around with his broom.

From the rooftop the firemen shouted, “It is the Daruma. It is the Buddha!” And it was. The crowd roared. How had he kept its giant proportion in his mind? He was a genius, so they said. He took his bows. And collected the coins that were thrown.

Sanba was there, not impressed. “A simple matter. Anyone could do it.”

So much jealousy amongst these silly men! “Then why didn’t they?”

“They wouldn’t stoop to it.”

“You mean they didn’t think of it.”

“It’s not even so original; there have already been giant paintings by the monks Kokan and Hakuin,” he said. “He did it only to make money.”

“Is that something to be ashamed of?” I flared. “We need money. Don’t you?”

Sanba touched my arm. “You are his loyal daughter; of course you would say that.”

“I am. And if you are our friend, you are loyal too.”

I knew that any artist might have done it for money. But Hokusai didn’t. He didn’t care for money. He cared not much more for us. He did it to be known. He cared for fame. I would go along: I had to. But I understood finally what I’d glimpsed the night I tasted snow in his arms. This ambition, my father’s desire to be great and known as the greatest—not the bakufu, not cramps of hunger—was the true danger.

18

Theatre

ON AN AUTUMN AFTERNOON
when I was sixteen, Shikitei Sanba looked over my shoulder as I drew the fine temple hairs of a courtesan and her maidservant, who were pictured side by side, in parade. He stood there for several long minutes. I tucked my chin, fierce in concentration.

“Something I can do for you, izn it?” I said. We spoke the chic Yoshiwara dialect to amuse each other. Shino wasn’t around to stop me.

“You can let me stand here unmolested. I am interested in what you’re doing, that’s all.”

I thought of Sanba sometimes when I lay down at night and wanted pleasant ideas to ease my mind towards sleep. I would recall his presence, the way he included me as no one else did, even excluding others, as if he and I had an understanding. Prickles of warmth would come over my chest and climb up my neck.

Sanba and my father had a curious friendship based on rivalry. Sanba boasted that he was the only man in Edo who could live on his earnings from writing. Hokusai said that Sanba was obsessed with sales and cared nothing for quality. He said that Sanba was a hack, that his writing was trashy and borrowed from his betters. According to Hokusai, it was always the cheap imitations that sold and never the genuine. Anyway, if Sanba was so successful, why did he run his cosmetics store, offering secrets of eternal youth?

“Maybe because he really knows the secrets,” I said.

It was true that Sanba sold cosmetics—black powder, red paste, whitening creams—just outside the Yoshiwara. He was the authorized and only dealer for the very popular Immortals’ Formula Longevity Pills. On top of that he had invented his own makeup base, called Water of Edo. My father scoffed and called it eyewash. “He gets it out of the river. No limit to people’s gullibility. They buy it in a bottle!”

But other artists had stores too, like Kyoden with his tobacco. Hokusai himself once sold condiments on the street. I began to suspect I knew why he mocked Sanba in particular. Despite the hack vendetta stories he produced on a regular basis, Sanba was a true original.

A cynic who believed in nothing, it seemed, but his own promises of eternal youth, Sanba had tight lips and frowsy hair. His dry jabs made everyone at the North Star Studio laugh, even my mother. He had credentials too, for having been persecuted. Before I was born, he had tangled with the fire brigades. Our flame-scarred citizens worshipped firemen, who were brawny but none too smart. When Sanba satirized them they attacked his home.

This brawl had given him his start and made him famous. The authorities punished Sanba instead of the troops. He was manacled for fifty days. He showed me his wrists. They bore the badges of honour of the sitting classes, scars where the leather thongs had torn the skin. They were the same as those on Utamaro’s wrists.

“I celebrate them,” he said. Waki had made tattoos of cat claws around the risen, white tissue that circled his wrists and wound up his forearms. Surprisingly muscular forearms.

I wouldn’t see him for months at a time. Then in a minute, like today, just as I was finishing the hairline of a Beauty, he would appear.

I moved my brush minutely, as I had been trained to do. Sanba leaned against my back. I could feel his bony shins on either side of my spine. “Let me take you to the kabuki.”

“I’m working.”

He spoke to Hokusai. “Give the girl a break. You work her too hard. Anyone would think you can’t get on without her.” He coughed his small, practised cough.

He knew how to twitch Hokusai’s pride. I blushed and bent farther over my painting. He said in a loud whisper that went in my ear and also over my head to Hokusai, “She’s got to see some of life, izn it?”