The Printmaker's Daughter (63 page)

Authors: Katherine Govier

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BOOK: The Printmaker's Daughter

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And there is a poignant anecdote about a spiderweb, which came from two students who visited their house when Hokusai was eighty-nine. Hokusai pointed to the corner of the room and called, “Ago-Ago,” one of his names for Oei, a reference to her jutting chin. “Until last evening there was a spider’s nest there. Where did it go? Do you know?” Oei, inclining her neck and squinting at the corner, couldn’t find the web.

This was the Oei I imagined: a daughter who was the butt of his “humor,” a woman who had to answer for missing spiderwebs. Why did Hokusai want the spiderweb? Was it something he wanted to paint? Beautiful—temporary, fragile, useful, handmade? Maybe it reassured him with a sense of new life. Maybe it was a pleasure they could share.

Such is the strangeness of the historical record. A shred remains, when so much goes. We will not know the whole, ever. We may know more when some other cache of papers or reminiscence comes to light. Until then, we speculate, wonder, postulate, imagine. Invention is necessary to history, as it is to fiction.

Most movingly, for me, the new footnotes contain testimony by the surviving member of Sakujiro’s family: Oei’s niece. Tachi was a girl when Oei vanished. She is the only woman who actually knew Oei whose views are recorded. Thirty years after her aunt’s disappearance, Tachi was kind to the memory. She said, “Hokusai was crazy. And the only way to live with him was to be crazy too.” Her version of the disappearance was succinct and eloquent: “In the summer of Ansei 4 (1857), a man called Bunzo invited her to paint the inn at Totsuka. Oei put her brushes in her sleeve pocket and went out. Since then, she has been missing.”

Acknowledgments

From the start, the historians of Japanese art whom I approached have welcomed the entrance of a novelist into their field. They have been generous with their knowledge, their connections, and their time. Part of the joy of writing this book has been making their acquaintance and learning about the world of
ukiyo-e
prints and paintings. To the following I owe a debt of gratitude.

John T. Carpenter, Donald Keene Lecturer in the history of Japanese art at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and head of the London Office of the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures. His open mind and subtle interpretations of prints and calligraphy guided me.

Dr. Ellis Tinios, honorary lecturer in the School of History, University of Leeds, and special assistant to the Japanese section of the Department of Asia, British Museum. His encyclopedic knowledge of the field of Edo-period illustrated books and prints is mixed with great enthusiasm.

Dr. Patricia Fister, professor, International Research Center for Japanese Studies, Kyoto, Japan, introduced me to Oei in the first place, and Professor Kobayashi Tadashi, professor of Japanese art history, Gakushuin University, Tokyo, and director, Chiba City Museum of Art, Japan, discussed her disappearance and influence with me.

I am indebted to Mr. Kubota Kazuhiro, formerly chief research curator for the Cultural Affairs Division in Obuse, Nagano Prefecture, Japan, and currently research associate at the Japan Ukiyo-e Museum, Matsumoto. He offered me unlimited use of the results of his labors in archives and collections across Japan. His passion to discover the truth about Oei and her work inspired me.

I would also like to thank Sakai Nobuo, CEO of the Japan Ukiyo-e Museum in Matsumoto, and curator Koike Makiko at Isago no Sato Museum in Kawasaki, Japan. The London art dealer who I call Zeller gave me hours of his time and was highly entertaining.

Librarians Jack Howard at the Far Eastern Library in the Royal Ontario Museum and Mariko Liliefeldt at the Japan Foundation in Toronto have been invaluable.

Twice I took Ellis Tinios’s course at the Rare Books School of the University of Virginia and loved it. The Freer Gallery was very generous in allowing us to see its collection and use its facilities. Barbara Nettleton read the manuscript in an earlier draft and provided many helpful comments.

And the Toronto translator, journalist, and storyteller Yusuke Tanaka has worked with me at every stage, providing insight and humor along with scrupulous translation of letters and documents.

Emily Honderich made the companion websites theghostbrush.com (named for the original Canadian publication
The Ghost Brush
) and theprintmakersdaughter.com, and Robin Honderich made the video
The Finer Hand
.

My agents, Helen Heller, who was involved with the novel at every stage of its creation, and Alexis Hurley of Inkwell Management in New York, are wonderful. My thanks also go to Iris Tupholme of HarperCollins for her exceptional efforts on behalf of the novel. I also thank Janice Weaver and Sarah Wight for the complex copyedit, as well as managing editor Noelle Zitzer and the whole team at HarperCollins Canada.

My faithful and tolerant partner, Nick Rundall, has lived with this novel for years; my grown-up children, Robin and Emily, my sisters, Trudy and Sue, and my amazing parents, Doris and George Govier, are never far from my mind.

I have read many books about Hokusai and the
ukiyo-e
of the Edo period, too many to mention here. I encourage readers to go to the companion website to the novel, theprintmakersdaughter.com, to view source material and images.

Glossary

ageya:
inn, banquet hall

bakufu:
feudal government of the Edo period

beru:
blue pigment imported from Europe

bijin-ga:
pictures of beautiful women

bin-sashi:
hair ornaments

bo:
long staff

daimyo:
lord

gyoji:
government officials working as censors

Juhachi-ya:
the number eighteen; here, the name of a merchant caravan

kago:
sedan chair carried by porters

kata:
pattern; in martial arts, a sequence of movements

keshi ningyo:
very small ceramic dolls made in sets

kosode:
outer garment

kotatsu:
table heater

koto:
stringed instrument, like a wooden harp

manga:
quick sketch

mochi:
rice paste

momme:
small unit of currency

mon:
unit of currency; also gate

moxa:
a dried herb substance burned on or above the skin to stimulate an acupuncture point or serve as a counterirritant

naginata:
long pole tipped with a blade

netsuke:
small, carved wooden charm

oiran:
grand, highest-ranking prostitute

opperhoofd:
commander of the Dutch at Deshima

rangaku-sha:
scholars of Dutch learning

ryo:
large unit of currency

saiken:
guidebook to pleasure quarter

sakura:
cherry tree or blossom

samisen:
bowed instrument

sekisho:
security gates at entrance and exits to the major cities

shinzo:
apprentice prostitute under the age of sixteen

shochu:
distilled spirits made from potato, buckwheat, etc.

shoki:
demon

shunga:
erotic pictures; “laughing” or “spring” pictures

surimono:
picture with poem written on the page

tabi:
socks

tatami:
woven straw floor mat

Tokaido:
one of the great roads of old Japan, leading from Edo to Kyoto

ukiyo-e:
woodcut print, literally, “pictures of the floating world”

unagi:
barbecued eel

yakko:
a noblewoman sentenced to a term as a prostitute as a punishment

yarite:
housekeeper of a brothel, often a former prostitute

Yoshiwara:
licensed pleasure quarter in the city of Edo

About the Author

KATHERINE GOVIER
is a winner of the Toronto Book Award and Canada’s Marian Engel Award for a woman writer in mid-career. Her novel
Creation
, about John James Audubon in Labrador, was a
New York Times
Notable Book of the Year. She lives in Toronto.

Visit
www.AuthorTracker.com
for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.

Also by Katherine Govier

Novels

Three Views of Crystal Water

Creation

The Truth Teller

Angel Walk

Hearts of Flame

Between Men

Going Through the Motions

Random Descent

Short Stories

The Immaculate Conception Photography Gallery

Before and After

Fables of Brunswick Avenue

Credits

Cover photograph © David Gibson/Trevillion Image

Author photograph © Martine Archambault

First published as
The Ghost Brush in Canada
in 2010 by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

THE PRINTMAKER’S DAUGHTER. Copyright © 2011 by Katherine Govier. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

First Edition ISBN: 9780062000361

EPub Edition November 2011 ISBN: 9780062100689

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Govier, Katherine.

The printmaker’s daughter : a novel / Katherine Govier—1st ed.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-0-06-200036-1

1. Katsushika, Oi, 19th cent.—Fiction. 2. Katsushika, Hokusai, 1760–1849—Fiction. 3. I. Title.

PR9199.3.G657P75 2011

813'.54—dc23 2011028810

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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