The Ghost Brush (100 page)

We knew the past was useful to get a story past the censors, but everyone understood the story’s meaning applied to the living, not the dead. The past was a hallowed place, printed in colours to flatter the ancestors of the rulers of today and blacken the memory of their enemies. We would all end up there, of course, and likely unremembered. The only thing to our advantage was that the tyrants were terrified of how they’d be portrayed. If they lost control, our version would prevail. They would not look pretty. And we—who loved nothing more than to write frivolous stories of our “floating life”—would look as if we were having fun.

History was useful to make these points.

Then the question occurred to me: Was there something Rebecca needed to tell in her book—other than the story of me?

“What interests me about history,” she was saying, “is the process of subtraction. How the full story is lost. We all know it happens. How the women—in the case of Edo, Japan, it was certainly the women, but it isn’t always; often it’s merely the inconvenient—are erased. How they are misrepresented. How they are cast off the island. Just exactly what that process is.”

“The powerful control the record, by force. But the powerless fight back.”

“How?” said the editor.

“Irony is their best weapon. You look at the popular media, and see how the courtesans became the height of chic. The greatest of them were supermodels. They set the fashion. At one time they created a style of wearing their kimono inside out, so the seams showed.” Again Rebecca gazed away as if she were seeing a parade of fashion plates from long ago. “I’d like to have seen that. They wore their kimono inside out, letting the seams show. It’s like a silent protest. It’s as if they could expose the tailoring wordlessly, point out the ‘garment’ of their time, show how it was made.

“It’s all about disguises,” Rebecca said. “Oei’s and everyone else’s. Costumes and layers and postures. All those changed art names; all those changes of address. But disguises that were known, and that you could see through. Warriors who never saw a battlefield, so they worked repairing umbrellas. Debuts of teenage virgins who were neither. A debauched licensed quarter that was actually a little bastion of freedom fighters.

“Kabuki actors with one great role—themselves. While they were acting, they wore their family crest and struck their habitual, famous poses. You went to see Danjuro VII, the matinee idol. But the character he played that day was secondary. His role was to be himself, over and over. His role was to reappear—no matter what the story, what the circumstances—reinvented, enormous, subject to whatever the fates threw his way, but still himself.

“The rulers insisted on their view and the ruled complied. On the surface. But that irony was always there. You were always meant to see through. The little reminder that in reality another story was being told. The official story was made of firmer stuff, literally, so it prevailed. But the other one is there under the surface. I just have to find it.”

Y
USUKE APPEARED IN THE PUMPKIN-COLOURED ROOM
with his translation of the two articles. They were both by the same man: Kubota Kazuhiro.

The first article was called “Oi Eijo: The Whereabouts of Katsushika Hokusai’s Daughter.” Kubota mentioned that Oei liked to paint in miniature. She had an extremely fine hand for details.

A man named Umehiko once owned a work titled
A Kitten Playing Behind the Bonsai
by Oi. Being impressed with the colour, which was extremely delicate and magnificent, Umehiko asked her how she drew it. Her reply was “I did not intend to make it a miniature but somehow it turned out like that.” According to Umehiko, Eijo drew fine illustrations even on silk with lining, which is very hard to paint on . . .

Certainly her work was known by some.

In
1833
, Keizai Eisen, a
ukiyo-e
painter, wrote, in his essay anthology titled
Mu-myo Ou Zuihitsu
, that “Ei, the daughter, works as a painter under her father. She is an excellent painter.” [Although she had] the reputation of “an excellent painter,” her works have not been scrutinized to the present day.

According to the before-mentioned essay anthology, in
1835
when Hokusai was hiding in Uraga, he wrote a letter to the publisher Suzanbo. In his letter, Hokusai wrote that the job commissioned to his daughter by the publisher he would now take over by himself. The job was to paint the illustration for the
New Hyakunin Isshu
(One Hundred Waka Poems) . . .

What if this work had been done by Oei, as it was commissioned originally? Would Hokusai have handed it over as his own? Hokusai himself admitted her superb talent in painting. He stated: “My hand skill in painting women would not be able to compete with that of Ei. She draws elaborately in her own style.”

Rebecca flipped that over and read the second article.

Hokusai seems to have had difficulty in painting women’s hands accurately. Take, for example,
Te-odori zu
(Hand Dancing), which is said to be one of Hokusai’s
bijin-ga
.

It is natural to suspect that this might be painted by Oei. If you look into Hokusai’s chronology, he was devoted to creating
Thirty-six Views of Mt. Fuji
towards the end of the
1830
s. I wonder if he dared to paint this hand-dancing picture under this situation, which required him to articulate the shape of fingers and hand. Hokusai was not very good at drawing hands and fingers accurately. So his signature placed on this work is in doubt. On top of that, “Touto” (East of Edo) was added to the signature. This could mean that the work was ordered by someone who lived outside Edo. I would suspect that Hokusai, knowing that the order was from somewhere out of Edo, handed over Oei’s work under his name.

As she suspected. No surprises there.

Amongst the works presented under the name of Hokusai, I assume that there should be more than just a few that were actually created by his daughter Ei. Particularly the works that were created during Hokusai’s eighties. These works had a lot of bright colours with a youthful touch, as well as an incredibly accurate drawing skill, even though an old man over eighty had supposedly created them. Some of these works are Hokusai’s Chinese figures.

The Chinese figures from the works
Sousou
and
Red Wall
[Y’s note: Sousou is a Chinese hero who was fond of literature, ad
154
–
220
] and
The Successful Kakushigi
[A general of Tang Dynasty, ad
697
–
781
] both have Hokusai’s signature, along with the sign of “age
88
,” but both might have been the daughter’s works.

My thoughts on the “ghost painter” do not go beyond hypothesis, but certainly her works should be reviewed in parallel with the works of Hokusai.

Ei’s presence after the passing of Hokusai can be found only in the documents remaining in Obuse, Shinshu. The account book of Takai Kozan (
1806
–
83
), reveals that Ei lived at the same address where Hokusai passed away in Asakusa in March
1853
, four years after the passing of Hokusai. Ei sent her miniature work titled
The Silk Book: The Illustration of Chrysanthemum
to Kozan in Obuse. Kozan recorded paying “
2
ryo
2
bu” in his books for that piece, which is far more than he ever paid to Hokusai.

The record still remains, but Oei’s work,
Chrysanthemum
, has not been found yet.

On the other hand, Hokusai’s
The Illustration of Chrysanthemum
was returned recently from London to the Hokusai Gallery in Obuse. This work has the sign of “age
88
,” the same as . . .
Sousou
and
Red Wall
and
The Successful Kakushigi
, [the other two] miniature paintings on silk. Was this magnificent work created by the hand of Hokusai, or was it done by his daughter? Final judgment is left to the viewer.

Yusuke had attached a PDF file of an article published in the Yomiuri newspaper last year. It says Kubota (forty-two years old), the curator of the Takai Kozan Museum in Obuse, found a receipt from Hokusai in his own handwriting for the work he did for the Kanmachi town festival float (a flying dragon). He is grieving that the owner of the letter sold this to a collector to make money.

I
had been looking over her shoulder as usual. Now I bounced up in my excitement. Who was this man Kubota, “Researcher, Japan Ukiyo-e Museum”? He worked in Obuse? He was a dauntless investigator. Despite the fact that he was rather careful in his wording, his findings flew in the face of the centuries of complacency that ensure everything is attributed to the great master, disabilities and age notwithstanding. I’ve heard the experts suggesting that apprentices made certain pictures. Kubota-san asks, for the first time,
which
apprentices? He looks at particular pictures, seeing a pattern, seeing an entirely different style emerge. He allows himself to speculate, to link suspicions; he allows himself those intuitive leaps that art historians—judging by what I had seen—are normally denied.

Rebecca was pushing her notes around her desk, trying to figure out how they connected. Where had she read about those chrysanthemums before?

She looked as if she were playing the memory game the courtesans liked. Two dozen shells are spread on the floor in front of you. Each has a picture painted inside, invisible at the moment. You turn one shell over and look: a picture of a kitten. You replace it and memorize the spot. You turn over another: a ball of string. Another: a dish with morning glories in it. A fourth: a bird on a branch. Now you find one more: the kitten. Where was that first kitten? If you can only find them, you can put them both together and take them off the table.

Chrysanthemums—she had it now—was painted in Hokusai’s very last years of life. A pair of scrolls. On a gold background, bright, dense, exact; petal by petal, perfectly rendered chrysanthemums of many varieties. It was quite unlike anything he had done before. And it was very bright, very detailed work for an old man. An old man who, twenty years earlier, had been felled by palsy.

Shuffle, shuffle went the papers. She replaced that shell and picked up one with the word “palsy” inside. She was puzzled about this palsy Hokusai had.

It was never given another name; it was just “the palsy.” But his symptoms were listed—stumbling, stuttering, being unable to walk. Richard Lane, for a long time the reigning expert on Hokusai, said that after the death of his second wife, “Hokusai was
68
, afflicted intermittently with palsy, troubled by his profligate grandson, but indomitable in his work.”

According to Lane, Hokusai cured himself with Chinese herbs, meditation, and daily painting exercises. At this point, he had already exceeded the average lifespan by half again, about twenty years. But he went on for twenty more years to make brilliantly conceived and minutely detailed images.

Those herbs and incantations must have been very effective indeed.

And anyway, how do we know he was indomitable?

The art historians said his illness was “intermittent.” He first had it in the
1820
s, his “bad decade” when he was in his sixties. Apparently he cured himself, and then, late in his life, had it again? He wrote in his own words, “My palsy has returned.” But later he made extraordinarily fine paintings requiring great dexterity. So it must have gone away.

Rebecca felt uncomfortable with this line of reasoning. It troubled her. She got up from her desk and took the dog for a walk to the park. She knew something didn’t make sense, but she couldn’t put her finger on what it was.

She came back to her desk and wrote it down the way she would have in her long-ago logic class:

Hokusai the artist was known to have a disease in his sixties causing him to shake and stutter and fall down.

But pictures made by him at that time show a firm and fine brush hand.