The Ghost Brush (106 page)

“Interesting point,” he said. “Would I have been more honourable if honour were easy to achieve? Would it still be honour?”

I laughed. “The difficulty is knowing the definition.”

“I’m sure you are right and there’s no hope for me,” he said, raising his glass.

Candour was his appeal. He was close to the muck and the mire; he felt its lure, and its horrors too. Despite it all, he still liked to paint Beauties. We shared that.

“Here’s to the great art you would make,” he said, raising his sake cup, “if you were not held captive under your father’s thumb.”

He reminded me of Sanba. Was this the way to my heart, then? Through the traitors’ gate that hated my subservient position to the Old Man? We talked until the clients came out the brothel doors and headed for the gate. Then we followed. The lamps were like stepping-stones in a garden of black. I looked for stars, but they were invisible that night, from that place. I ground my teeth at his word for me—“powerless.” It made me think of my mother.

“I am not powerless. I refuse to be powerless,” I said.

He gallantly took my arm. “Ago-Ago,” he said with a laugh.

There it was again: Chin-Chin. My big chin. My self-will. My father’s teasing, which now came from Eisen’s mouth as fellow feeling.

Arm in arm we walked through the Great Gate, over the bridge, and up the zigzag path on Primping Hill. Our four feet clattered together, companionable. It was something new. Always I walked alone, or behind my father. Eisen coddled my elbow, and my thoughts drifted to Tomei, my ex-husband. They drifted to the woman, whoever she was, who was married to Eisen.

We came to the docks. A boatman stood by. His small, roofed wooden craft nudged the pier.

“Here,” said Eisen, pulling coins from his purse. “We’ll take her out for a paddle.”

I sat under the canopy and drew my cloak around me while Eisen pushed us out with the oar. We glided. The water was still and reflected the low, snow-filled clouds. He pushed us beyond the noisy restaurant boats with their gaudy lamps and past the scattered working boats that came and went all night long. We reached the centre of the river, where a wide swath of water moved quickly and smelled of the deep. Wet snow drifted in thin lines and then sank.

It was colder there. Eisen put down the oar with the exaggerated care of a man who knew he was impaired. He stood and the boat rocked. I giggled. He made his way back, tucked his kimono under himself, sat beside me and pulled me into the warmth of his body.

What happened next I will not describe to you. Modesty strikes. Modesty! Me? You might laugh. But I was not in charge. It was as if a spirit—slow, earthy, and amused—took hold of my blood and my bones from within. This was new. I was cold, but I was melting, deep red. Eisen braced himself to balance me, but not soon enough. We fell to the floor of the boat.

This in itself was ridiculous, not to mention painful. We coughed a little and spoke to each other in broken, courteous phrases, like strangers who had been riding in this conveyance and were forced on top of each other by an earthquake. We were restrained. We tested each other. Then we both gave up the act.

We became rapacious—grasping and utterly selfish. I had known nothing like it. It went on—for how long I have no idea—and then it was over. I was dazed and very cold with melted snow and splash. Eisen too seemed shaken by the violent sequence. We both came back to ourselves slowly. The boat was rocking. The lamp at the prow was flickering. For anyone watching, it was a clear announcement. We laughed.

Eisen got to his feet, retying his kimono with dignity. I sat up and retied my obi. Another boat had drifted near. I could just make out two dark, urgent figures.

Eisen sat looking away from me at the water with the oar in his hand. The clouds had moved off. I could see stars buried deep in the river. We had drifted away from our boatman on shore. Eisen cursed. It would take a bit of rowing to get us back to the dock. I didn’t mind. I shook out my clothes and tied the warmest, driest parts to me. Then I sat and waited as he pulled against the current to get us back to dry land.

W
ITH MY FATHER ABSENT
I controlled our money. I counted it out carefully when I paid the vendors, unlike Hokusai, who tossed money at people’s feet because he felt it was beneath him to deal in it. Then, no fan of consistency, he would do the opposite and beg for it. I saved what we were paid and hid it with his seal in the tangerine box behind the statue of St. Nichiren. I kept us alive; I did the commissions he found dull. Yet Hokusai hated me to manage us: he changed everything when he returned after months of absence.

It was two days before the new year. He came in steaming from Uraga, full of fresh, cold air. I was cramped from sitting so long. I jumped up to greet him. One leg was all pins and needles and buckled under me. I stumbled.

He laughed. “Oh, clumsy one! Oh, daughter mine, you don’t change!” he said.

Perhaps Eisen had spoiled me. He always said it was a pleasure to set eyes on me.

“I am sorry,” I said, in a not-so-sorry voice.

“Now don’t be sad! I’ve come to be with you for New Year’s. We will all be one year older. I will be seventy!”

And I would be thirty.

“We have our visits to make. And the monies to collect.”

“And bills to pay.”

“We must have money from the publisher. Thirty-six Views is so popular!”

He was very pleased with himself. And he looked healthy. A second youth was on him. I wished to be happy, but I simmered with resentment. Was he to have two lives and I none? He sat and called for tea, for sweets. He loved sweets. I didn’t keep them in the house when I was alone. I preferred salty things. I sent a student out to get some.

A feeling of festivity came over the studio. I lit a pipe. I drank sake. I watched Hokusai, full of stories, wagging his head, putting on a show.

“It’s all that beru,” I said. “It’s made you into a boy again.”

“Nonsense. I am the Old Man. I am the oldest man in the town.”

He showed me his latest drawings for the Fuji prints. He was expanding the series to forty-six; after that, he said, he would do one hundred more.

“But will you be able to think of so many? And each one different?”

“I will, I will. I am young again, didn’t you say it?”

It’s true he seemed his old self. His speech never slurred. His eyes were bright, and though I was beginning to think of sleep, he bounced with energy. I had something to tell him. I had told no one yet, and it pleased me very much.

“See what I will be working on in the coming year?” I said. I held out the note. It was from the publisher Suzanbo. “He is asking me to do the illustrations for a new edition of 100 Famous Poems by 100 Poets.”

My father snatched the note from my hand and scanned it. “He has written asking that Oei do these illustrations?” he said. “And not her father?”

I cast my eyes down and set my head on an angle.

“There must be some mistake.”

Maybe his eyes were not so good after all. He had to read the note again and again. He looked up at me in quite comical confusion.

“Are you sure that is what it says? I don’t think so. I think they are asking you to arrange for me to do it.”

I had no need to look again. I had looked many times. “He commissions me.”

“But why? There must be some mistake. Why are they asking you and not me?” He seemed bewildered.

“Because they like my painting style, do you think?” I said dryly.

“Your style? What do they know of your style? I know your style. I am your father. Your style is the style I give you. No one else knows your style.”

Now he was getting angry. He flung the note to the cats. He puffed out his chest and blew.

“Suzanbo knows my style,” I said, as mildly as I could. “People know, after all. I have my students here. I am busy while you are out of Edo. Where is that note?” I retrieved it from my friends the cats, who had been pawing it. “He’s asking me because he wants to me to do it!”

“Oh, no. That’s not a good idea. I would do a much better job,” said my father.

“Different . . .” I allowed. “More expensive, for sure.”

“No. Better. Certainly better. For the waka poems? There is no question.”

I was angry. But I was not permitted anger. Anger belonged to him. I allowed my eyes to go dead.

Hokusai saw my feelings. He puffed a little more, and then turned with the pivot of his heel from child to stern patriarch. “You know, Daughter, that I appreciate your style. I have said so. But trust me in this. I’ll take this commission. Give me the note. I’ll write back to Suzanbo and do these myself.”

35

Laughing Pictures

REBECCA AND ANDREW WERE INVITED
to a party. It was in a little semi-detached house on the fringes of Chinatown. These houses are a Toronto oddity, with their bisected faces and their two parallel staircases hanging off two narrow front porches like dogs’ tongues. Inside, the staircase carried on straight up to the second floor, tilting as if it were detaching itself from the wall.

They stayed on the main floor.

It had been made into one room, with a decent mantel, a stencilled ceiling, and a low sink in a linoleum counter. Charming, if insanely awkward. People must have been six inches shorter a hundred years ago.

The room was full. The host was fifty-five and engaged to a thirty-year-old called Brittany. This party brought their friends together: her pals in tiny skirts and bare shoulders, his pals with grey tufts and crinkly eyes—a math prof; a used-to-be, half-famous actress. Rebecca chatted with the ex-wife of a big-time lawyer she’d come across in another life and then headed for the kitchen.

The bridegroom-to-be was at the stove, stirring a pot of chili. A bespectacled man stood alongside. This was Blair Drawson, a terrific illustrator; when she did magazine features, he sometimes worked on her stuff.

“What are you doing these days?” he said.

She told him.

“Oh, Hokusai. My favourite artist,” he said.

She said she was interested in his daughter. For once it wasn’t “I didn’t know he had a daughter.” It was “You know he painted her vulva?”

Oh.

“Actually, I didn’t know.”

She stared at the chili. She seemed to be blushing, but it may have been the wine.

“Painted her vulva?” Could she have missed that?

This happens. You haunt libraries; you flog all over the map. You importune the experts and think you have it covered. Then you go to a party and an old acquaintance dangles a piece of key, arcane knowledge that may or may not be true.

“I think I even have the image,” Blair said, a little primly.

“She’s rumoured to have contributed to his shunga, but . . .”

“No, he painted her. I used to have a lot of notebooks with this kind of stuff. I’ll look it up.”

I
t could no longer be ignored. It was time to take up the question of
shunga,
or “laughing pictures.”

Rebecca went back to the books. Hokusai was known to have made many erotic drawings, at two different times in his life—first when he was younger, and later in the dark years of his sixties and early seventies.

It was strange that so many were produced in the
1820
s, during his notorious bad decade, when he went by the name of Iitsu. And at that time the women’s figures were very different from his earlier, elongated ones—they were soft, thick-bodied.

Rebecca revisited the writings of the prodigious Richard Lane. His question about these later erotic prints was chiefly, why did the Old Man return to the subject of sex? Saito Gesshin said, “Oei paints and has done many designs for woodblock prints published under the name of Iitsu.”

And Kobayashi-sensei raises the subject and then drops it. “The statement that Hokusai’s daughter was responsible for many of the works done under the name of Iitsu is important evidence of her role in the production of Hokusai’s designs, but it also raises an issue beyond the scope of this essay.”

About the shunga, produced in the “Iitsu” decade, the experts did like to weigh in. From Hokusai’s studio came some of the most beautiful—and shocking—shunga that exist.

The Old Man set down scores of agonizing human beings caught up in the
reductio ad absurdum
of sex, the longing, the savagery, the bitterness, the joy, the ridiculousness and the insatiate hunger.

—James Michener,
The Floating World

Until one has seen [the] mocking faces and [the] contorted bodies one can see no final image of Katsushika Hokusai . . . His heavy monumental figures of women [were] not among his more graceful works . . . The pictures are characterized by the use of a distinctive crinkly line. There is even a minority view not shared by me that the drawings are not by Hokusai but by his daughter Oei.