The Ghost Brush (77 page)

“Her husband is a wicked man who only wants money now that she is a well-paid courtesan.” He stormed ahead of me in his bowlegged way, fuming. “Why should Shino’s husband get her money?” he muttered as he stomped ahead. “He sold her, in truth.”

We marched along.

“You see, that’s just it. People sell anything. What they love. Their labour. Then they take the money to the next place. Each time it changes hands, the money becomes dirtier. It is an abomination,” he said. “Someone admires my print, they give it a value in this dirty money. I don’t like it,” he said to the road in front of him. “So I don’t pay attention.”

We passed a man with a slow donkey. He stared at my raving father, pitying me.

“How can you not pay attention? We need money. Without it we’ll get debts too.”

“I won’t give coins the courtesy of my attention. I don’t know their names. They are evil spirits.”

He was faking. He did know their names. But his hatred was real. It was another of his ways to be different. Everyone else liked money. Waiters and cleaners picked up coins from the gutters. The courtesans pretended they didn’t see the folded papers that were left by the tea sets. But they were very quick, as soon as eyes were turned, to unfold and count the money.

But I didn’t believe this was why we were leaving Edo.

I ran to catch up. “Is it because you have to hide from the bakufu?”

“Hide? Me?” He snorted with scorn. “You must be crazy.”

That silenced me. I was bad for having angered him. He was moving quickly. But now I stormed ahead.

It was a revelation to be able to move.

In the city we were stopped at every turn. There were crowds you had to dodge. The canals had small, crowded bridges. Our district was closed by a stockade with guards. Locked gates divided neighbourhoods from each other. Every way forward was blocked. You had to dodge and dart.

Now as far as I could see there was open space.

I began to feel the wind.

I set off past women carrying faggots on their backs, fishermen with two baskets over the sides of a horse, pilgrims in white. It was fun to run in boys’ trousers. I imagined that there was a face on the back of my head, and it was making huge and hideous expressions at Hokusai. My eyebrows—the ones on the back of my head—were pinched together. My mouth was stretched into a square, my tongue dangling from the middle of it. My eyes were crossed, the pupils down and in the centre, looking down my nose. I was the villain. When Hokusai peered through the crowds ahead to see where I was, this mask-face would leer back at him. Hah!

But when I looked back, he was gazing off in the distance. Indifferent to my insolence. I was ashamed. I thought of something to frighten myself. It was a habit I had. I learned it from his stories. First the pickled heads. Now I imagined again that he might sell me.

I hung back and found him. “Would you sell me, Father?”

He gave that rattle of scorn he was so good at. He let his lower jaw drop, and he forced the air out so it hissed and stuttered as if it were going up a rusty old pipe. “I would not find a buyer.”

Was I so ugly? So useless? Hadn’t he just said I was his apprentice?

I ran ahead of him again and hid in a clump of pines. I watched him. Hokusai bounced and zigged and zagged along the road. He stopped to sniff the air. He talked to himself, or to absent me. Or to nobody: he needed no excuse to keep talking. He was like a crazy person, it was true. I wished I could run away and not have to follow him. But his voice reached me in my hiding place.

“At the sea we will look outward.” He sounded not at all angry. “It will bring peace.”

His pleasant voice wooed me. I couldn’t leave him. Maybe he could have left me, but I was not prepared to wait and see. I fell in step beside him.

N
ight was falling as we came to a crossroads.

“Will there be money at the fishing village where we are going?” I asked.

My father gave me a stern look.

“I have told you we are leaving the city because of money,” he said. “Would I take you to a place where money is also the god? No, there will be no money.”

“How will we eat?”

“We’ll trade my work for lodging. We’ll take our food from the sea and the earth. We’ll sleep in the homes of your mother’s family.”

We trudged along.

“The Shogun’s men won’t find me in a fisherman’s hut!” he blurted.

Hah! I knew we were fleeing. It was just as Shino had said. But I understood we were not to say so.

“I’m tired of the pleasure quarter anyway. Everyone’s working there. I want to see the other famous places.”

The next post town was ahead. We found an inn where they fed us and let us sleep in exchange for my father making a scroll painting of a Buddha. We went to sleep on clean straw.

14

Barbarians

THE NEXT DAY THE ROAD AHEAD
was just as long. I looked at the people going by on packhorses, but I did not ask my father if we could have one. We moved aside when the
kago
of the rich merchants hove up behind us, carried on the shoulders of men whose eyes and arms bulged. After a long time we sat beside the road. I lay in the grass while my father drew three fat peasant boys running with a kite in the field.

“Where is the sea?”

“I told you. We’re nearly there. Can’t you smell it?”

I sniffed. It’s true the air was different. Salty.

“You’ll like it. It’s a great beast that sleeps and wakes. It roars and it moans and it is its own master.”

“What about your publisher?”

“I want no more publishers. I will make poetry cards and sell them on my own. I will make volumes of laughing pictures for rich women.”

Farther along we came to a teahouse. Beside the teahouse was a workshop where a man and his family were carving the thumb-sized wooden charms we called netsuke. Hokusai sketched them. I picked up the charms—a fat Buddha, a fox, a sleeping cat, a stove. I wished I could have one. I could hold it in my palm and tighten my fingers around it. I could hide it in my sleeve when I got my kimono back. We all hid our valuable things, not because we feared their being stolen, but because we were not allowed indulgences. Our luxuries were invisible, like the paintings merchants commissioned for the linings of their coats. We were inside out.

Clouds came over and the sky was threatening. It was still only the third day of the new year. Spring, but not warm. Soon it would rain. We came to a post town, the dark buildings tight and seamless against the sides of the road—inns and stables and, up a few stairs, a small roadside temple under red arches. We would have gone in to sit by a warm stove, but something was happening. A man who made straw shoes for horses was setting up his barrow. A noodle vendor lit a fire under a big vat of water. I saw peasants leading lame children, blind ancients, pregnant wives.

“What shrine are we coming to?” I asked the noodle man.

He laughed. “It is no shrine at all. The Dutch traders are on their way to Edo to present themselves to the Shogun. The procession will be here by nightfall. One of them is a doctor of medicine.”

The Dutch, alone amongst foreigners, were allowed to trade in our country. Hokusai said it was because they were prepared to step on their holy book. They did this to assure the Shogun that they wouldn’t preach in favour of their Christian gods. “It seems a strange reason to trust someone,” he told me when I asked. I thought again of the time I had seen the red-headed devils through the high window of the Nagasakiya when my father went to sketch the picture. I remembered the roar that went up when they came out the door in front of the crowds. These were also men, I realized, to whom money was a god.

A captain of the Dutch had come to our house. He asked Hokusai to prepare two scrolls showing incidents in the life of a Japanese from birth to death, one for a female, one for a male. These were for the first in command. The price he offered was
150
ryo. The captain also wanted a second set, for himself, and offered the same price. He said that the entourage would remain in Edo only ten days more, and that the work must be finished by the time it left.

The sum was enormous. There was dancing in the studio: as usual we had no money and the red-headed barbarians were going to save the day. But the time was short, and we all had to work.

My sisters ground the pigments and dissolved them in water. As the youngest I cleaned brushes and ran errands. My father drew funeral processions and weddings and festivals, imagining what the foreigners would want to see. The students positioned themselves along the length of the scrolls and filled in the colours where they were told.

Even so, it was too large a task; someone always had to be working on the scrolls, and so we rarely slept. Hokusai did not want to compromise his high standard. “We must tell the Dutch that we cannot have the scrolls finished in ten days’ time,” he said finally.

I was the messenger. Captain Hemmy with his frizzy cloud of sun-coloured hair leaned over me and boomed that the Dutch had no more time in the capital and would have to leave without the scrolls. I ran back to the studio with the dreadful news. But my father only grunted and continued his painstaking drawings of temple bells. Nothing, not even cancellation, would disturb his work.

But luckily for us, the Shogun delayed the foreigners’ appearance before him. One day and then another, the Dutch waited to be called to the castle. We all continued to work on the scrolls. It was as if the Shogun was helping us, but of course he would not have if he knew. He forbade this trade.

Four days later we finished the scrolls.

I ran to the Nagasakiya with the news. We were asked to bring them that same day.

The opperhoofd was very pleased with his scroll and produced the gold ryo exactly as had been promised. But Captain Hemmy put his spectacles down his nose and set the scrolls side by side. He compared his to his superior’s, unrolling them together, inch by inch.

Hokusai looked up and looked around. He made a little musical noise with his lips. He farted.

“Both the same? Both from your hand?”

Hokusai did not deign to answer.

Captain Hemmy let his spectacles fall off his downspout of a nose to his chest.

“I believe mine are copies,” he said. “They are inferior. The price should be exactly one-half.”

It was a terrible insult.

Without speaking, and with enormous dignity, Hokusai wrapped up his kimono in the front of his thighs and cleared his throat with that hiss I knew so well. He stepped forward and carefully, even gingerly, rolled up the second set of scrolls. He did not bow. He took me by the hand and we walked out. The large wooden door closed behind us, and we were back in the streets of Japan.

At home my mother took the
150
ryo and asked for the other
150
. My father showed her that we still had the second scrolls. “He tried to cheat me.”

She screamed. “You have the airs of a lord and the ways of a peasant! Why are you so proud?”

“You know nothing.”

“We need this money. Half of it is spent already.”

He shrugged.

“Do you deny it? Look at this child. He is hungry!” She pushed my little brother under his nose. I guess we girls weren’t hungry?

You couldn’t escape their fights in our small rooms. My sisters and I wormed our way into the corner and covered our ears, but the shouts penetrated all the same. “Where is that useless older brother? He should be bringing money into this house!”

“Woman, beware! Curse the children of my dead wife,” Hokusai said, “and you will bring down demons on your head.”

“And you, Tokitaro”—she called him by his birth name to remind him he was nothing much—“you love the dead and not the living. You love yourself and not your faithful wife. One hundred and fifty ryo would save this household from great misery.”

I prayed that she would be silent. But the woman sailed out in gusty lament, moving in circles like a hawk in a gale. At last she exhausted herself and collapsed.

“You waste yourself in rage,” he said. “But I forgive you.” He spoke gently. “You cannot help it. You do not understand me, and you will never understand me.”

My mother wept.

“Which part of our poverty do you think I don’t feel?” Hokusai said. “The cold and wet? The shabby garments? The way I work through the night? The way this child runs errands, as I did as a boy? The way, even though my mastery is accepted all over Japan, we have meals of rice alone?

“You may think this is misery,” the Old Man went on, “but there’s something worse. That’s when a stranger—a barbarian—holds me in low regard. When he says I have not done my best work.” He was good, that far. Then he lost it. He flung his arms out and stamped. “Anyway, he is a bad man. He is not a good person. Unpleasant airs emanate from him.”

“They eat beef, is all,” she said.

“I don’t care what they eat.”

“You don’t care what we eat.” She ripped through his words with a shriek.