The Ghost Brush (71 page)

I came closer, breathing down her neck. What was this drawing? I had never seen it before. I knew of only two drawings of me in my lifetime, each by my father—one of just my face, the other of a more secret part than that. Where did this come from?

I breathed even closer to Rebecca’s nape. It looked like the work of Tsuyuki Kosho. I could recognize his style. A young disciple, he used to visit in those days, late in my father’s life. But when did he draw this? And why? And how did it get onto her screen? I thought Kosho liked me. Beware your friends. Which one would you trust to create your image for the ages?

R
ebecca was hooked.

She had made a lot of pathetic excuses. It was too hard. She didn’t know anything (about women in Edo, the nineteenth century, the Dutch). She didn’t speak Japanese. She even said that if it was such a terrible time for women, thinking about it would be depressing. “It will be expensive and exhausting. I’ll be enslaved for years, and never relax until it is done.”

But that presence. It lingered. It intruded. She really had no choice. She had no desire to make an attack on history. Except. That there was definitely a story here.

Her first manoeuvre was to go to the heart of enemy territory, a place they called Fort Book. Drab linoleum floor, high steel shelves bricked up with book after book after book. Such huge, heavy things and so unyielding. These were known as the stacks. These “stacks” were horizontal, row upon row of them. In and out of the spaces between, silent caretakers, like morgue attendants, pushed their metal carts around.

That’s where she found that there is no formal biography of Hokusai. There was a collection of reminiscences called Katsushika Hokusai Den, by Iijima, published in Japan in
1893
, written when family and associates who knew him were still alive. There was a translation of this into French, by Edmond de Goncourt, one of the Old Man’s French fans. There was nothing in English.

She sat down to read the French.

There was so little that evoked the man. Rebecca had assumed that if she looked in the right place, she’d find tax records, voting lists, memoirs, invoices, personal diaries. But no. Ukiyo-e artists were not in the category of persons for whom the shogunate kept birth records, let alone memorabilia. Furthermore, Hokusai hated possessions. He did not keep even his own work. So all there was to mark Hokusai’s long life—other than the ten thousand prints and paintings scattered amongst the museums of the world—were a few random lines.

Here was a small accounting he’d written in a letter from the fishing village of Uraga to his editor in Edo: “Three sheets and a half . . . forty-two momme; take back a momme and a half that I owe you, and please give the rest, forty momme and a half, to the carrier of this letter.”

Another letter had Hokusai asking for one gold ryo to be paid in the smallest change possible “so I can pay my little debts to the tradesmen in my neighbourhood.” In another letter he complained of having only one robe to protect “this old body of seventy-six years against a cold winter.”

Goncourt concluded that Hokusai lived in a “black misery,” partly because of his independent spirit and partly because of the low prices paid to artists. But the historian discounted the joy of making art. It sounded as if Hokusai was paid well enough but spent his money fast.

Rebecca made a question mark in her notes.

Survivors remembered Hokusai as eccentric. “Like many great artists,” he sometimes had “an unpleasant humour and was disagreeable to men who did not show him the deference that he felt he was due, or whom he didn’t like the look of.”

She read on.

Hokusai was surrounded by women. He painted women, he had women students, and he had daughters. In particular, one homely daughter named Ei helped in his studio. She was also an accomplished painter “in her own right.” Hokusai himself was recorded as saying, “She paints Beauties better than I do.” Ei, who took the painting name Oei, was said to have made many of the paintings of Hokusai’s middle period, when he was known as Iitsu. Iitsu meant “one again.”

Rebecca made a note.

There was similar commentary elsewhere. “The third of these later daughters [the first of his second wife], Oei . . . proved of a rather masculine, domineering nature—‘she could paint but not sew,’ it was commented—married a student and eventually, nearly a decade later, was divorced. On the death of her mother she returned home to live with her father. Oei was a distinguished artist herself, assisting Hokusai in his work as well as ministering to him in his old age.” And a passing comment from a biographer called Saito Gesshin, who lived in their time, adds this: “H[okusai’s] youngest daughter, Ei (better known by the name Oei), resembles her father—instead of washing the dishes after a meal, she just leaves them lying around without thinking twice about it.”

I
clear my rattles. They don’t know what I was thinking. First an unflattering portrait and now the crime of not sewing attaches to my name. Also leaving the dishes undone. “Masculine” and “domineering,” I have become.

L
ooking through a volume of critical essays, Rebecca stumbles across an explanation for that touching sketch of father and daughter.

“Tsuyuki Kosho, one of Hokusai’s many pupils, left for posterity a sketch that shows us the living conditions of his teacher when he was eighty-four years old.” Although Tsuyuki was painting from memory forty years after Hokusai’s death,

he was able to call up the scene in vivid detail. Considering that this was the atelier of a renowned master it strikes us as being a remarkably cramped and slovenly place.

The scene shows Hokusai drawing a picture as he lies on his stomach under a
kotatsu
(table heater). According to the explanation the artist never left the heater. When he tired of drawing he would fall asleep there; where he woke up he would start to draw again. His bedding, we are told, was infested with lice. His daughter Oei, by then well along in years, watches over her father as she rests a pipe against a worn-out tatami mat. Behind the hibachi in the background are piled boxed lunches and sweets. On the wall is a notice stating that the artist cannot accept orders for fans or pictures.

It is not difficult to picture the solitary Hokusai carrying on his work in such surroundings.

S
olitary Hokusai? I’m indignant. Anyone can see that I was right there. So now I’m invisible too. Well along in years? Kosho was a kid.

R
ebecca sat back, nettled. How could the author of these remarks be so sure that the sketcher remembered the scene well? It was forty years later, and the artist was dead. How could he say Hokusai was “solitary” and working all alone? Oei was at his side. Wasn’t she working too? She had papers in front of her. But her face was scrunched tight with misery.

She noticed that John Carpenter had translated this essay nearly fifteen years ago. That nice man! The one who said Oei’s was a great story! No wonder he looked sheepish; no wonder he said from the stage that early on in his career, he had “learned to look at certain works with the eyes of others.” He must have suspected at the time that something was amiss.

B
ut any further details had gone out in the wash.

The library had only a few mentions of Hokusai’s daughter. The Kosho sketch turned up again and again. It was the basis of much that was assumed about her, including, apparently, a museum display in Tokyo.

Shifting her search to the disciple, Tsuyuki Kosho, Rebecca discovered that he “appropriated the name Iitsu after Hokusai’s death.”

Hokusai often changed his name. But he rarely gave a former name to a student. He sold Sori II, in the beginning, it was true. He allowed a favourite student, Hokumei, to use his seal—another story. Most often his disciples were given names that suggested the connection—Hokuga, Hokumei, Hokkei—but did not overlap. However, when the master died (and was not there to object?) Tsuyuki Kosho upped and took the name Iitsu.

That was bold of the man. Who was he? A youngish man, only in his twenties when Hokusai died. But wasn’t Iitsu Oei’s painting name, not her father’s? Why would this Kosho want to name himself after the daughter? Rebecca rechecked the Goncourt translation of the biography. She was not mistaken. This was what was said: “Oei did many of the paintings in Hokusai’s middle period that are signed with the art name Iitsu.”

You would have expected a statement like that to light some fires when it was written one hundred years ago. But no.

Seventy-five years later Richard Lane, a prodigious and early Hokusai expert, mentioned it. As definitive paintings by Oei were rare, he supported “the view that—in a life devoted entirely to painting—she was occupied in anonymously assisting her father in his oeuvre. When she does sign, she includes the notation ‘Miss Tipsy,’ which may reveal one facet of Oei’s personality—a general fondness for drink.”

C
alumny and aspersions, I said from the top of the bookshelf, or “stack,” where I had stretched myself out. Not enough to be homely and untidy, I have to be a drunk too? And who amongst us didn’t take the odd cup? I hear Rebecca give her characteristic little “ugh!” of exasperation.

This Richard Lane concluded that Oei deserved a study of her own, but he was not about to take it on.

Coward.

No one else took it on either. Not for the next fifty years. Rebecca toted books back and forth. Nothing new. Then, in a book called Hokusai Paintings: Selected Essays, edited by Gian Carlo Calza in
1994
, a certain Professor Kobayashi repeated Goncourt: “The claim that Hokusai’s daughter Oei did the work under the name of Iitsu is outside of the scope of this essay and I will not deal with it.”

Double coward!

R
ebecca returned to the book called
Japanese Women Artists 1600–1900
, by Dr. Patricia Fister, where she had first read of Oei. Dr. Fister said that she was the most talented painter of Hokusai’s daughters.

“Painting came naturally to [Oei] and it is said that she poked fun at her husband’s work.” In Fister’s version of the story, the laughter was life-changing. It landed her back at home with her father, where there did not seem to be much to laugh about.

The “bad housewife” fallacy was embellished. When their quarters became intolerably dirty, they moved out and rented another place.

But at least Patricia Fister listed my triumphs. She said Oei made a small mark with paintings—not prints—that she signed herself. Five or six signed paintings remain in museums around the world, and there was also a book called the Illustrated Manual for Women. “With the publication of this book and a dictionary of tea with her designs Oei achieved a certain degree of fame in Edo two years before her father’s death.”

I
N THE NEXT FEW WEEKS
, by sheer luck or divine design, an exhibition of
ukiyo-e
works owned by the Boston Museum of Fine Arts came to Toronto. In it was one of those rare signed paintings by Katsushika Oei. It was called
Three Musicians.
Rebecca trotted off to see it.

It was a huge painting—ten feet wide and nearly as tall—stunning in deep, gem-like colours of ruby and emerald and a deep blue. Three women—a townswoman, a noblewoman, and a courtesan—played music together. The event was fiction, a scene that could never have taken place, because each was of a different class and the classes were forbidden to mix. Each was dressed to indicate her status. The colours were deep and intense, black and red and blue. The noblewoman plucked a koto; the townswoman in her indigo kimono held a long black bow, while the overdressed courtesan stole the show, back to onlookers, plucking a samisen with long, flexible fingers.

It was unlike anything Rebecca had seen, with its festively elaborate fabrics in rolls and bows, its feel of immense dignity in the bodies of the women. What music did they play? What did they sound like? She lingered, half-expecting a presence. Nothing, silence.

It was a glorious work. It was lavish at this size, and she thought it must have been a commission. For whom? Rebecca wondered. She needed to know more.

There was only one way.

R
EBECCA STOOD IN A SMALL NEWSPAPER OFFICE
with overflowing wastepaper baskets and grey, worn upholstered swivel chairs. Behind a desk that was layered with old newspapers, sitting back in his chair with his glasses on top of his head, squinting at a page of very small characters that he held six inches from his nose, was a man.

“Hello, Yusuke,” she said. She smiled warmly. Enthusiastically.

The man rubbed his eyes. He put his hand up vaguely into his hair, felt around, and retrieved his glasses. His hair stuck out at all angles.

“Oh, hello,” he said without actually looking at her. He was shy. But she was a client (and therefore one of the many kami, or gods), and he had to be nice to her.