The Ghost Brush (109 page)

Another spring was surely on the way. I felt the sun on my skin and there was warmth in it, not the mere, cold imitation of sun of only a week ago. In the alley the usual preparations for New Year’s went on. Women were pounding rice for mochi balls. My neighbour was putting up the pine and bamboo over his entrance.

“So the Old Man has returned!” he cried out.

“How did you know? He came at night under his cloak of invisibility.” With his stick and his stride and his incessant chanting, he was recognizable from blocks away.

“Ha, ha. He brought his purse with inexhaustible supplies of money, then, too?”

“I wish!”

I didn’t often speak to these people when I was alone. I’m sure they saw me as gloomy and withdrawn. But when my father returned—though at first I was resentful—my stiffness began to melt. At least he had the effect of joining me to the world.

“Will you be starting the cleaning today?” the woman asked me shyly. It was tradition to clean house from top to bottom, and pay and collect all bills so one entered the new year fresh. Just thinking of it made me tired. Today and tomorrow we should air out the house, wash the bedding, sweep away the cobwebs, and dig out the crumbling wrappers the cats left in the corners. That and the bills. I went in to face the Old Man.

“Father, we need to talk about money.”

“Chin-Chin,” he said jubilantly, “I have made a pretty God of Fortune here. He will provide.”

“He has provided, but not to us. And we owe a great deal.”

“Troublesome,” he said absently, with one eye on his drawing. “And not unheard of.”

“The bill collectors will come today. And I cannot think of one place that we could go to collect money.” I went to the orange crate with the statue of St. Nichiren in it and pulled out the papers that blocked the back of it. There was all the money we had. Only two hundred mon. I showed him.

“Then it’s a good day for us to move house.”

I groaned. To move again? But it was less work than cleaning. When you were gone from the quarter the merchants tended to forget your little debts. “Do you think so?”

“Oh, I do, I do. A new vantage point on the world. Do you know, I have always wanted to live in Fukagawa.” The area he named was downtown, near the Mannen temple and the Eternal Bridge.

I thought it over. It was a pretty, arched bridge. And moving solved a number of problems. Beyond our debt and our dirt, there was Monster Boy. His father had died the year before. This made my father, as the surviving male relative, officially responsible for Monster Boy’s debts. And he had located me when I moved back to Asakusa. If we left, it would take the young man a little while to find us again.

“We’ll go, then.”

We both sat down to write letters. Hokusai gave instructions to various publishers, and I sent word to Eisen and my students.

We packed and were on our way in a few hours. The neighbours looked knowingly at our retreating backs.

I
n Fukagawa we found a clean-swept set of rooms that had been vacated that same day, probably by others wishing to avoid the year-end debt collection.

We set out our mattresses and our painting bowls. I had gone to the well to get water when I saw Eisen walking my way. “You can’t hide from me!” he boomed. I found myself smiling for the first time that day.

“I never wished to.” I brought him inside to greet my father, who was already hunched over his work happily.

“I just happen to know some artists around here. Come with me. We’ll have an ‘old year forgetting party.’”

In a teahouse several streets away vats of sake were helping men brush off the old and welcome the new. I joined them, but my father had only a few cups of weak tea. He left us there and went to the temple. He would chant until midnight, waiting to hear the bell toll. It would toll
108
times, once for each human vice.

“Did you tell him you wanted to sign?” Eisen prodded.

“No.” I could not.

I have to admit that Eisen’s questions led to daydreams. I began to wonder how it would be if I were, as Hokusai had been—and might be again, with the success of his Mt. Fuji prints—the most famous artist in Edo.

I was quiet that evening.

I watched the other artists, famous too, each for one thing or another. They took the corner position in the room, sitting back with arms out along the walls on either side. They proclaimed with mouths open, faces alight with expression. Not loudly. They had no need to be loud: people went quiet when they started to talk. Smiles of satisfaction melted down these men’s faces. They set forth opinions, jokes, commands, questions, and stretched out their arms to beckon the serving girls: bring it to me, bring the rice bowls, bring the sake, bring me the accolades.

How could I be one of those men? Women sat small and correct and silent. Their mouths were red and tiny, pinched around the lips. Morsels of food were carried there and almost invisibly sucked in.

I thought of Mune and her friends. They had more confidence, being in the merchant class. But their accomplishments were under wraps, as were their bodies. If I complimented a female student, she denied that what I said was true. She made way for a man; she gave in to a man’s opinion; she flattered a man. “Man is superior, woman inferior.” That was doctrine.

I thought about my signature. Was that what was needed? Instead of his? But publishers knew that “Iitsu” meant Oei. Everywhere my work was mixed and confused with his. Even in Hokusai’s head. Even in my head. My wanting to be known was only a sign of vanity, one of those vices we were about to hear about.

At midnight we went to the temple to hear the bell toll. It did indeed toll
108
times, each one of which went to my heart.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
Hokusai did not feel well; his extreme good spirits were fading. He lay on his mattress. He watched my stabbing brush. He saw the deep pigments I mixed. “Too much paint,” he murmured.

I grunted. What was there to say?

“I have an idea,” he said. “Why don’t you do one of the One Hundred Views of Mt. Fuji?”

“That series is yours.”

“It’s mine, but I am your father! I want to share it with you. Why don’t you do the New Year’s view?”

“Because I want to do my own commissions; I wanted to do the waka poems, which you stole from me.” I could hardly believe I had spoken those words.

“You bring up that old question?”

He lived in a constant present, while I was getting old. “Yes, I do.” He tried to make amends. “Here, do one. Do it.”

It is considered good fortune, at New Year’s, to see an eggplant, Mt. Fuji, and a falcon. (You might ask why the eggplant. Because they were phallic? Because the Shogun Ieyasu loved them, or because their name sounded like the words meaning “to achieve something great”?)

I sketched a black falcon, in close-up with a faint Fuji behind. The falcon was killing a pheasant; both predator and prey were perched on an eggplant. It was meant to be my little black joke. The two birds were entwined so you couldn’t distinguish one from the other. The predator was at the neck of the pheasant, whose head was snapped sideways, on a sharp angle, with his eyes wide open.

My picture was out of place in his series. “What has happened to the humorous and optimistic Hokusai?” they would say. “Why this dreadful vision to see in the New Year?”

T
HAT NEW YEAR CAME IN
and went out, and another and another after that. I was not counting, exactly, except to say that my father’s behaviour grew more preposterous with his age. He made the forty-six Fuji. He began to work on the next hundred views. He assumed that the public’s appetite for these was insatiable. And maybe it would have proven to be. But the publisher ran out of money and the blocks sat without being printed.

A
SPRING MORNING
. I loved to be up early, when the wandering monks were just coming to the streets to beg. When the tofu vendors set up their carts. And the bathhouse master was lighting the fire under his cauldron. I loved the smell and crackle of the wood. I loved the
clunk, clunk
as money started to change hands. I watched the teashop girls as they were just getting to work. They ordered a huge breakfast from the carts, although they couldn’t spare the money.

I set out, walking. I was alone again. Hokusai was gone, an old man on the road. I had the day to myself and spent it crossing the canals of Edo, stopping at markets and bookstalls and teashops. As the afternoon stretched on, I turned my steps towards the Yoshiwara. My heart kicked in my chest just to take the few uphill steps on the bridge: I had grown up walking those streets. I liked its tilting, off-kilter position—against, but part of, the shogunate. I liked their spirited, doomed resistance. I loved its blatant commerce, the festivals and frantic lures, the courtesans parading under castles of hair, and the doubleness—beauty and cruelty.

I was drawn back down to the poorer streets, to the brothels alongside the moat where, as the sun set, women arranged themselves behind the lattice. There was such heaviness in their movements despite their youth, despite their thinness. They tended one another nervously, a flock of birds. I shuddered at the strange animation that came over one of them when a client came close to the slats and beckoned. In the low lamplight, the dark pickets of the fence laid black lines across the women’s bodies. Their faces were heavily whitened, their cheeks slack with boredom, and from their piled-up hair the clutch of pins, the bin-sashi, stuck out like spokes on a crazy wheel. Shino—lost Shino—had taught us to ward off attacks with these hairpins. I could still remember the steps to that “dance.”

Mune, who not only patronized my studio but also introduced her friends for lessons, had begun to bring me commissions for scroll paintings of women of the Yoshiwara. She and her elderly mother, Hokumei, acted as go-betweens; I did not know who the art lovers were who bought these pieces. It was mysterious and entirely anonymous, but when a commission came it was with ample money for paint and gold, and I delighted in the work. I came here to watch, but I drew nothing until I was at home alone. Courtesans reading by starlight, courtesans behind the lattice—these were my favourite subjects. I used no subtlety in colour: the black was black and the lit area was glaring white, nowhere to hide. I painted the onlookers from the back, with their dark wraps concealing their faces, and beyond them the watched women melting under high, bright lanterns.

What sort of people were we to invent this class of woman solely formed to please a man? I had asked the Dutch doctor that. Now I asked the question again, to anyone who would see, in my paintings. Who were we to force them to be supplicant? To sit on display rolled in bales of fabric and skin caked white like parched earth. To sleep until noon and work all night, tending men. To speak and move and even think like children, like the possessions they were. Who were we to distort lives this way?

I could not watch without thinking of the brave and fragile Shino, who had been my sister and my mother, as my blood sisters and mother had failed to be. Her spirit had carried her through even this ritual of the lattice and into marriage—and away from me. No doubt the blind man took good care of her. Could she bear his ham hands on her? His fat, stuffed fingers probing? And what did she make of his sightless intensity, so different from my father and his laughing, all-seeing eyes?

Mitsu, font of all gossip, had reported that the blind man had succeeded as a moneylender.

“He has an excellent clientele, you wone beleeve,” she had said to me, winking at Eisen. “That woman’s living high up on the hill now. Climbing back to where she came from—but this time ther’z no noble familee, only money, keeping her there. Izn it?”

It had been many years now. Twenty years, when I counted. I had lived an entire lifetime. I supposed I was nothing to her. The child of her secret lover, a lover whom she was forced to abandon, and who had abandoned her. My father remembered her, I knew: he had no other woman. She had forgotten us, doubtless. We moved so often, nearly every year. We kept the wanted as well as the unwanted off our trail.

B
ut one day, as if I had conjured her, I saw her.

I was strolling a narrow canal behind Yoshida Street, a moody backwater near Nihonbashi. There was a deserted washhouse on a platform where local people came to wash vegetables and do laundry. Beside it was a noodle house where I sometimes bought soba from a dogged husband and wife who kept their business going despite a dearth of customers. But this day I found they had gone out of business.

I walked slowly by their premises. A blue-uniformed policeman waved his baton—get along—and then saluted. It was in an empty house like this that the last big fire in the Yoshiwara had begun, only a few years ago. That explained his presence.

I stopped at the tiny bridge that crossed the still canal. It was evening, and the moon was high. It slipped between the rooftops and lay on the still water, giving a little light to this dark place.

I saw a woman come out of the doorway and begin to walk along the path, close to the wall. She was wrapped in a cloak and quick as a cat, but her long, straight back caught my eye. Before I thought about it, my lips were speaking.