The Ghost Brush (114 page)

“I’ll do just fine. Just as I have been.”

He drew little receipts for our payment. He put his face in profile at the top, a cartoon, himself bald and wrinkled with some straight hairs sticking out the back of his head. His ear was a huge upside-down snail. His eye socket was deeply set, his nose straight, and his chin a wobble sinking into his neck.

Underneath he drew me. My face was like a mask. I had a great, wide forehead from which my hair sprang back in waves. I had a dot of paint between my eyebrows; my mouth was a firm, straight line, tending neither up nor down. Strong-jawed woman.

“You ma’ a paper li’ this e’eryti-me. Ma-mak-ke sure get pay.”

He put his stamp on it. “Hokusai, age
88
.”

T
he Ganshoin temple was a small, pretty Buddhist temple, which was very old and had been rebuilt a few years before. It sat beside a small pond that was noisy with frogs in the spring. Kozan hired Hokusai to make a Ho-o bird for its ceiling.

The phoenix is an auspicious bird that lives so long that plants begin to grow on its body. We put three kinds of plants in the design. We put leaves of the goyo no matsu (the five-needle pine). These looked like scales, or feathers of the bird laid closely one on the next. We also added fine green laurel leaves and then, finally, two big brown leaves of a plantain plant. One of the plantain leaves overlapped the other. This left a space the shape of a large triangle between them. We looked at this space and noticed that it looked like Fuji-san, the symbol of our country.

We drew the pattern in black ink. This ceiling painting was to be enormous, the size of twenty-one tatami mats. Takai Kozan liked our design very much and asked us to mark in the colours.

When it was time to begin, our helpers laid twelve large cypress panels on the floor, four across and three along. We made a copy of our original design in sumi ink on the twelve boards. I mixed the paints—first the white layer to cover the whole surface. Then, one board at a time, I applied the reds, yellows, greens, and blues—beru, of course and another, very bright. Finally we decorated the Ho-o bird with small bits of gold leaf.

The bird was fierce and tightly coiled, his beak up against his back, his eye powerful and black. He seemed to stare at me no matter where I stood in the room. We called it Ho-o Staring in Eight Directions. My father rested a great deal; he directed me, pointing this way and that, and pretending to be scandalized if I took a shortcut, scolding me lavishly, occasionally offering a single word of praise. At times he knew he was growing weaker, and accepted it. Some days he was confused and could not find his outer garment, or was unable to get up off his knees. Then my heart broke.

On other days he turned on me with a face of stone. “Now what are you arranging for me?” he would say in a poisonous voice. He made me so angry I said to myself, Fine! Let him grow old and foolish. It is time he went! This is too difficult.

Always after one of his angers he would laugh like a baby, his shoulders going up and down, his face crinkling up between mouth and eyes, and I melted and feared the day he must go.

T
HE HEAT BROKE WITH A WILD STORM
that heralded autumn.

It started with a column of grey cloud in the distance. I was walking by the river when the wind hit my back, pushing me home. In our little house I found my father asleep. The wind played around the outside, rustling and pushing, banging a loose gate, making the branches of the pine sway. I placed our painting goods under the mattress. I feared that the roof would fly off.

The bombardment began, a chorus of clattering. I couldn’t imagine what was hitting us. It sounded like little wooden balls. They struck the metal pots outside the door; they struck the roof and made a different, more deadly sound. And now they struck the rocks, which began to chime. Were these bullets from the Western muskets?

I looked out and saw round white ice balls falling and leaping back up from the ground, demented. I began to moan. Hokusai pushed himself erect and rubbed his fists in his eyes, and began to chant his sutras loudly in time with the battering.

It was like a rain of arrows. I covered Hokusai’s old bald head with my arm; I was hiding, but I wanted to see. The noise was astonishing, high pings of metal, low pings of wood and straw and lead tile, hard cracks of rock being struck. My father cited punishment from the gods and thought they were trying to kill him.

“Th-thun-thun-der gods are c-c-coming for me!” he cried. A long time ago he was walking along the Tokaido and lightning hit him, throwing him into a rice paddy. I knew this story. For years he had boasted: heavenly fire had touched him once and left him shaken but alive, and now he was safe from it. “They cannot kill me,” he had said. He was Raijin the Thunder God.

But now the story changed.

“I was too proud! The Thunder Gods are coming to punish me!” He was frantic with fear, and he made Tachi cry. She hid under the desk while the storm went on and the Old Man gibbered on the futon.

In the face of this I had no option but to be practical. “It’s weather, Old Man,” I said. “Only weather. It came from the mountains,” I kept saying. “It will go back there.” But I too believed in omens. I was afraid that the politics of our host angered the gods.

A
t last the town was completely still. I looked through the paper windows, some of which were torn, and saw piles of the dangerous white shot everywhere. “Stay inside! Come away from the window!” Tachi cried.

More thunder rolled in. The lightning followed—forked, ragged shoots that crossed the open sky in one flash and were gone. The rain began after that. “This is too much!” We held each other under the onslaught.

Finally the storm passed. Hokusai fell asleep, but I stayed awake. Later the storm returned. This time there were no strings of white fire. After the rage and growl of thunder, the sky itself went an all-over daylight white, throwing all the trees and buildings and even their tile roofs into instant visibility, as if day had flashed on and then gone out. The whole sky was white now, and then black, and then white again. Shadows burst up and then dissolved.

I paced our little hut. I looked out the paper windows. I wished I could paint what I saw: the village frozen, the Kozan house, the houses of the elders, the simple farmers; every one was silent. Where had the people gone? How had this storm disconnected the threads of our living together so no one even looked out?

I waited for the flashes that made shadows appear and gave trees and houses a dark presence in precise outline. Each time, I tried to remember how it had looked before the light went out. The storm went on all night, and rain fell, melting the hail. In the morning I was exhausted from lack of sleep, and so were all the people in the town.

In the morning my father was unable to get out of bed.

I knew it was time. We would have to go back to Edo.

41

Exorcisms

WHEN JUHACHI-YA DEPOSITED US
in Edo I put my father into our tenement. If he did not lie down or stay propped against a wall, he fell down. The
yoi-yoi
palsy or the touch of the Thunder God, something was getting him in small, stealthy attacks.

We went back to the daily exorcisms. He would concentrate fiercely, make a lion image in only sixty seconds, then struggle to his feet and go straight out into the alley. He crumpled the page and threw it down on the ground. Sometimes his hand was so shaky that the brush picture was illegible.

People would walk by and pick up these pieces of paper, uncrumple them, and knowing the great master lived within, hurry away gloating over their prize. After seeing this, I began myself to slip outside when Hokusai’s eyes were closed, pick up the balls of paper, smooth them, and hide them.

N
OW BEGAN THE MOST DIFFICULT TIME
. We moved three times in that next-to-the-last year, from Honjo across the Sumida back to Asakusa, first to Tamachi, then to Umamichi, and finally to a tenement on the grounds of the Henjoin temple. There we remained, finished with running. We had accepted our fate. We were strangely calm.

The kabuki theatres near Nihonbashi had burned, and they were moved to the Asakusa temple, right near us. We were on the margin of respectability, surrounded by entertainment and by water—canals, the river, and marshes.

In the city it was said that Hokusai was able to work without glasses and walk long distances every day with back unbent. But that was a dream. In darker moments we faced the truth. He could not leave home again. We declined an invitation to return to Obuse. He lay or knelt in our tenement, and I sat beside him. I was nearly fifty years old. “Lucky me, I still have a father to make me feel young,” I joked, although in truth he was killing me.

I saved my thoughts for Eisen, again my friend. He had given up print-making with Hiroshige and now wrote novels. The occupation suited him. As he grew older he took younger and younger women as his bedmates. I saw him walking with one of them. He shooed her: “Go! Be gone! Here is a real woman I want to see!”

We gave each other small, broken hugs and parted again—the prostitute, I could see, darting out to join him from some shopfront where she had waited. It didn’t matter. I had the sense that I had disappointed Eisen by not becoming famous enough. Perhaps I had disappointed Sanba too, wherever he was: “You have an important life to lead!” he had said.

Was this my important life? Or was there another that had eluded me? My days had all come down to this: ghost brush, muse, and nursemaid to the great man. As he faded, my love grew stronger. If I ever wondered what it was for, this endless labour, this ill-paid work, I had only to look at his beloved face and know I would do anything to disguise the helplessness there. My work did not matter. To quote Sadanobu, “There have been books since times long past and no more are necessary!”

I saw it now. Making pictures resulted in nothing more than making pictures. There was no reward. If we were lucky the earnings helped us survive as long as the work demanded. There was no virtue in it. Only a few knew my work, but they respected me. A soft life, fame? Grand ambitions had never been mine. They had been my father’s, but he was wiser now, and thought only of improving his art.

But then work, strangely, came my way.

I illustrated a tea dictionary that was much admired. Then came the Illustrated Manual for Women.

I
was happy with my new commission. I made elaborate small figures in the intense colours that were my trademark. I put my heart into it. It was better, more concentrated, more original than it needed to be.

For the opening spread I created a crowd, an array of dark-clad women. One was a courtesan with fourteen hairpins and a hemline recognizable as the Hokusai/Oei look of controlled frenzy, kicked up on the side so she could do her figure-eight step. One was a nun with a black hood over her hair. One had a toothpick held coquettishly to her mouth and two black dots on her forehead. Another was a woman from the countryside in plain cotton; another wore a kerchief, while one had very long, black straight hair tied in one bunch, coming together below her waist.

I showed all the tasks and ways of women in my town. Bridal processions, the debut of a courtesan. (“What’s the difference?” Eisen laughed.) Table settings. (How would I know?) The right way to apply makeup.

Outside, autumn deepened. In rare moments a shaft of sun would strike the earth, exposing the rubble of our lives. The treetops were frail crowns of black against the sky, but their lower halves held on to browning leaves. They seemed to be captive, while their leaves skipped away, free at last.

I got up early, went out to get tea, and came back. I worked until twilight, then dried my brush and saw my father off to sleep. Small white flakes whirled in the air, landing on my cheek and turning to water. I worked quietly beside Hokusai’s mattress on the Illustrated Manual for Women.

Disciples dropped in. Katsushika Isai had taken over our work in Obuse, having travelled there with Juhachi-ya. That made me jealous. The young man Tsuyuki Kosho had also been to Obuse and had dealings with Koyama the rice merchant. Isai said that my father had given him his seal of Hyaku, one hundred years. It made me uneasy. I did not believe this was so.

I drew a rectangular tray. I put nine round bowls on it, in three rows of three. I made another rectangular tray: six round bowls on that one, in one row of three, with one on its own, and a row of two. Perhaps these represented different meals. I drew a large bowl with a fish lying on it, the head and tail drooping off the edge, and a tray with a hen, small thing, beak off one side and tail feathers off the other.

This was the way not to do it: clumsy housekeeping, a classic sketch that should have the X drawn through it.

Here was a woman serving from a bowl of noodles. Would she eat those noodles herself? No. She was holding them high over the bowl with her chopsticks up around her eyes, the bowl at her chest, a baby on her lap. The people sat at small, individual black tables with a tray top on which were plates of fish and bowls of rice waiting to be served.

The seal of Hyaku had been for the future. The future was in my hands. I would speak to my father about it. But my father was difficult to make sense of these days.