The Ghost Brush (97 page)

He found her lack of shyness refreshing and mildly challenging. She spoke to him as an equal, a thing he had never experienced before with a Japanese woman. She said her father was in his sixty-seventh year.

“An old man!”

“He has boasted that since I was born,” said the daughter. “But now it has become true.”

“What is he working on?” he said.

“Beautiful women not so much any longer.” She became a little vague. “Peasants in the countryside, views of natural wonders . . .”

He asked to see some of Hokusai’s paintings, and the woman said she would return. He went to his desk to take notes for the book he would one day write about the Japanese character. What was this pride in being old? He had heard it said that death was the high point of a man’s life. And this lack of respect for conventions by the artist’s daughter? They were eccentrics—if such a thing were possible in Japan.

So many contradictions! The government of course was two-faced. The announced strictures were extreme. Yet punishments were applied only in opportunistic circumstances. He was summoned here and then ignored. He was not to explore, but official scientists called on him with official questions. The Japanese navigated these layers without much difficulty. But he found them inexplicable.

Take Japanese women, for instance. The rare sophisticated woman ran a family inn or store. Others, earthier, were skilled in weaving or silk production. But even the most independent of them withered in the presence of a male relative. Women, he observed, had no social context of their own. They rarely appeared alone in public; it was positively Arab that way. Here was the greatest puzzle: there appeared to be no coercion. Women were willing partners in their own invisibility. Why was the Japanese woman so dependent, her very existence defined by obligation?

And yet, as seen today, why was the opposite evident, at least this once?

He put down his pen and laid his head on his Western pillow in his Western bed, carted all the way from Nagasaki. He might learn more from this strange daughter when she returned.

W
HEN I TOOK PAINTINGS
to the Nagasakiya, he offered me tea. And a sweet cake that I found delicious. The Miracle Doctor told me about his journey, about how, at each stop along the way, he had pulled out his telescope and looked at Fuji-san in its virgin beauty. He measured it again and again, and wrote down his observations while he was being carried in the sedan chair he called his flying study.

“But was the height of Fuji-san different, from different places along the road?” I said.

“Of course! It depends on where you are looking from.”

This astonished me. I thought the mountain must always maintain the same height. He laughed to see my pondering. “Of course it is a trick of the mind. Don’t you see?”

“The mountain is a god,” I observed.

“It has no magical powers,” he said shortly. “But it appears to change when our position changes. It is we who go up and down. So we were actually measuring not the height of the mountain but the lay of the land.”

“I see,” I said, and I was beginning to.

“I hid my compass in my hat,” he confided. He was so proud of this contraption that he showed me the tall black felt with its pocket inside.

“Compass in your hat!” I was amazed. “Is it a brain you wear outside your head? Does it help you think?”

The Dutchman did not laugh. “I don’t need help in thinking. Only in measuring.”

He was marvellous to look at and so curious. And I thought he was good. He wanted to do good. But he lacked caution.

“It will not go unnoticed,” I murmured, my face bending low in front of him.

“Unnoticed by whom? Your authorities allow me to do what I wish. My curiosity arises from my great respect for your people,” he said.

“It is not for people to be curious.” I used a term that meant a lowly person.

“I am not lowly,” he said. “I am a scientist.”

“The laws . . .” I began and bowed again.

“These laws are not serious. They exist, but no one pays any attention to them.”

He elaborated.

“Laws,” he spouted, “they are ignored. For instance, the law against smuggling. Everyone knows the opperhoofd goes out and comes back laden with trinkets. The opperhoofd is not searched.” The doctor made a joke. “When he arrives back at Deshima he is very fat. Then he goes to his chamber and disrobes, and suddenly he is thin.”

I laughed because he seemed to expect it. I said that he had learned to speak Japanese well. I asked him how he had done it.

“Hanging on the wall in my toilet I have a copy of the poem children use to memorize the syllables.”

I cackled at the picture this conjured.

He looked startled at my outburst, but so was I. Why so frank?

“In my sleep, I work on vocabulary,” he said.

“How?” Hokusai would be interested in that. If he could figure out how to draw in his sleep he would do it.

“I say word pairs as I’m drifting off.”

We were suddenly struck dumb. Our conversation had got off to such a fast start; it had hurtled, and now we were embarrassed.

The doctor suddenly seemed to wonder about me.

“Are you married?”

“Yes.”

“Did you choose the man you married?”

“I chose him after I met him in my father’s art classes.”

“This is unusual,” he said.

“My father knows me well,” I said.

“Did you study in the classes too?” he asked.

“I did, when I was younger. But now I teach the classes. My father is very busy. Hokusai had decided it was my job to pass along his method.”

Silence. I could have told him more about that, but he didn’t ask.

“Are you married?” I asked him.

“I have a Japanese wife.”

It was a puzzling answer. Yes, he was calling her his wife, but at the same time he was saying she was Japanese, which seemed a qualifier. “Does that mean yes or no?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said stiffly.

“Do you have a Dutch wife as well?”

At this he laughed.

“No, Otaki is my only wife. We have a child. I love them both very much,” he said.

I was charmed by the way he said that. I knew no man who spoke of love so simply.

The doctor wanted famous views of Edo. He wanted festivals. He wanted pictures that showed our rituals. He wanted these in watercolour. I agreed that Hokusai would paint them. We settled on a good price. In exchange, he offered to provide us things from Europe. I said, as courtesy required, that we wanted nothing. Then von Siebold mentioned the colour beru.

Ah, now that was different.

I knew this colour. We called it Berlin blue. It was a new blue from Prussia, very expensive, very strong. It had appeared in our markets only a few years ago. Painters in Osaka used it for actor prints. Here in Edo, the rebel disciple Eisen was using it on fans. He was clever, that man. The grains of the pigment were very fine, and it printed more smoothly than our dayflower or indigo. Our blues were fugitive—they faded. But beru was long lasting.

I told the doctor that beru was too expensive. We couldn’t even afford it for a painting, where we would use a very little. For a print it was unthinkable, because of the quantity we’d need.

“No, no,” he said. “It can’t be true. Nothing can be too expensive for the great master.” He wanted to give me gifts. Though I demurred, again for manners, he produced a little beru right then. And some Dutch paper. And a pencil.

As I made my way back through the twilit streets, a little more lurid as dark grew, with performers japing, drums beating, hawkers insistent at the end of day, I wondered why he had given me the pencil.

I think it was because we had spoken of painting in the Western style, and of the straight lines used to draw buildings, pillars, and furniture. Von Siebold’s draftsman used a pencil, and he thought Hokusai might use it to make his paintings.

But I used the pencil. First I held it lightly and reverently in my hand, knowing that his long, slender fingers, his surgeon’s fingers, had touched it. Then I began making lines with a straight edge to draw in the scaffolding around my figures. Over the pencil lines I used the watercolours. The results were mixed. I had asked Hokusai to paint, but he would not.

“These are for the Dutch doctor,” I reminded him.

“You do it, and get the students to help,” he said. “Stupid foreigner. He won’t know the difference.”

30

The Gift

I RETURNED WITH PAINTINGS
. Von Siebold smiled more kindly on me each time I saw him. He cleared the room of his learned hangers-on. We fell into conversation, as if we’d done this often.

He liked Sudden Shower: the peasants bracing themselves as a cloudburst broke over their heads. It was a common enough scene in Japan, but he didn’t know that.

“An instant so fleeting only a genius could have caught it,” I said, showing him the gestures of self-protection against wind and water, the onslaught so frequent in our land. I enjoyed the charade. It was a picture Hokusai had designed but left to me to put in the colour.

We discussed my father’s genius. So unconventional! How refreshing his vision was; how, of all the Japanese artists, Hokusai was the one whose name would one day be known in Europe.

Von Siebold’s secretary wrote down the particulars of the sale. The doctor smiled warmly at me, which gave me the confidence to ask my question.

“You are a learned man,” I began.

He nodded. No argument there.

“In England,” I said, “there was a great writer, name of Shakespeare. Do you know him?”

He was surprised by my topic. “Any educated man knows the works of Shakespeare. We studied him in school.”

He struck a pose.

“‘What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and motion how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals!’”

Oh, he was like an angel himself. It was the one word of English I understood. I clapped my hands. It made tears spring to my eyes, that man reciting the strange words that rolled and tumbled together. The secretary chuckled. I had never heard the language before. Sanba loved Shakespeare; that’s how I knew of him. Perhaps a few of his plays were read here, by the scholars in Dutch. But Sanba was no scholar; he was a scavenger of names and fame, and knew nothing of the man’s work, only that he was great.

“That is wonderful,” I said carefully. “Can you tell me about the man?”

“What?”

“Can you tell me, for instance, if this Shakespeare had a daughter?”

I don’t know what question he had expected next, but it was not this one.

“A daughter?” he said. “He has been dead two hundred years.”

“Yes,” I said, “but . . .”

“Little is known about his life.”

One of the other Dutchmen in the room came and spoke in von Siebold’s ear. Perhaps he understood my question.

“It is possible that he did have a daughter,” said von Siebold.

I smiled. “And she wrote for the stage also?”

No need for consultation this time.

“No.”

“But she helped him with his writing?”

“No, no.”

I was shocked and disappointed. “Why not?”

“Maybe she didn’t know how to write.”

“The daughter of the great master was not taught to write?” I had thought these Westerners were highly civilized.

“I doubt it. Shakespeare was a simple man from the provinces. This daughter, assuming there was one, may have learned to sign her name. Or maybe to write simple things, like a list of her possessions.”

“She would not be required to help him with his work?” I had spent many hours imagining this woman. I felt certain she existed.

A light came in his eyes. He thought he understood me. So I was interested in the role in her father’s life taken by this mythical daughter. His smile became broad.

“He went to live in London and left both wife and daughter behind,” he said gently.

“Oh! But how did he manage without her?”

He tipped his head. He spoke as if not wanting to disappoint a child. “We are imagining this,” he cautioned.

“My father,” I said, and I knew I had given myself away but threw all caution to the wind, “my father had three daughters. Still not enough.”

Von Siebold laughed. I laughed with him.

“Of Shakespeare’s daughter, we have no information,” he said firmly.

No information. I was stunned. I had not imagined a great life for her. Only a little one. But not that fate. To be utterly unknown. To have one’s labour for the art forgotten. To have one’s very existence in question.

“England is not like here. Shakespeare’s work was not a family project.”

“Not?” I didn’t believe it. I sat trying to absorb it.