The Ghost Brush (130 page)

After the meal a juggler made an iron top climb straight up a stiffened rope and spin on a knot at its high end. Then a conjuror came out on a raised platform, like a geisha’s stage. His hands were beautiful, thin and veined: I twitched to draw those hands. He folded a piece of white paper, opened the folds, inverted them, and refolded, until he had a pretty white butterfly.

Then he put his hand in his opposite sleeve, pulling out a fan and opening it in the same instant with a flick of his narrow wrist. The paper butterfly sat in the palm of his left hand. He fanned, creating a breath and then a breeze; the butterfly began to gently flutter its wings. The movement was so sensual; I felt the tickle on my own palm. The butterfly rose slowly, and then suddenly, as if it was startled, it leapt up several feet.

The foreigners nodded to one another with widening smiles. How clever these little Japanese fellows were.

But it was magic. They forgot—we all forgot—that the butterfly was only paper. It zigzagged across the tables. A foreign officer tried to catch it. It darted up and escaped. Two other men in uniforms jumped up to chase it, but the butterfly sank and spun—never too far away from its creator’s fluttering fan—still out of reach. People shouted and pointed. After a few minutes they became convinced the conjuror had a live butterfly up his sleeve, which he had substituted for the paper one.

I heard a translator ask how he trained the butterfly.

The butterfly bobbed, as if thinking to land again, but there was nowhere—the magician had hidden his left hand—and so it rose, flew high, and then dropped down again on the edge of the fan.

But in a few seconds it was off again, investigating nearby dishes as if it might find nectar there, even—making us gasp—coming close to the burning tapers on the tables. It sped, it whirled, it rose, and it plunged; it never faltered, never fell, always found the air that was pushed its way by the fan.

I was moved: the craft of it, the sham, the painstaking practice the conjuror must have endured, the dedication to his illusion of fan and paper and air and wrist. The unearthly intelligence of the conjuror’s beautiful hand, with the veins running up and down in it. Fragility danced to the tune of impossibility—buoyant and dauntless.

The barbarians were silenced, awed. But I could see their regret: this was not an item that could be bought, shipped, replicated. This is why they are barbarians, I thought. Paper butterflies—and everything like them—will be lost when we dance to their tune.

P
eople pushed back their chairs, making a sound like a room full of irate hens. At that point a translator behind me stepped forward. “You are Madame Hokusai?”

“I am,” I said. My brother bowed. I did not. I had taken on Hokusai’s habits.

“The evening has run away with us,” he said. “I had intended to present you . . . There was someone who wished to pay his respects to you. But it is impossible. Everyone is leaving.” He gave me a helpless look. “Did you enjoy yourself?”

“I did,” I said, and I meant it. The bubbles of the champagne kept rising in me, and the butterflies flew in my head as we jolted in the dark by palanquin to an inn. Then, later, the champagne let me down badly, and the world seemed suddenly empty and without purpose. Who could possibly have wished to be presented to me?

T
WO NIGHTS LATER
my brother joined me in the garden. Behind us the pine tree tossed at the top of the hill. The sound of waves reached us on windy nights like these. I took the horn-shaped pastry he offered. I pulled a tiny bit off one end and put it gently inside my lips.

“You eat like a woman tonight,” said Sakujiro kindly. “But it is rare that you behave like one.”

Perhaps in his mind it was a simple observation, without injury intended. I decided to take no offence.

“I am trying to make concessions to your household,” I said. “It is not necessary to smack my lips. But it is necessary to paint.”

He nodded.

I reached for another sweet. “Are these from Tosaki?”

“Yes, he sent them. For you, actually.”

He handed me this little lifeline—I was not forgotten by those who had loved my father—as he tossed a crumb to a waiting bird. My heart hardened.

“Tell me,” he said, “does it trouble you that you receive no recognition for this work?” He gestured vaguely at my little row of brushes, always beside me, especially when, like now, the light was nearly gone from the sky.

It was a question with a hidden blade. Sympathetic in appearance, and yet cutting.

“I am recognized by the people who matter to me,” I said. A blade in return.

“I know you’ve done the painting,” he said quietly. “I know it.”

I said nothing. What was there to say?

Dissemble, came Shino’s instructions. You will get your way in the end.

“You do me a great honour, Sakujiro, to acknowledge the work I continue, to assure that Hokusai’s fame lives on.”

“Of course, times are changing,” he said. “Japan will become modern. We will all be forgotten, and our small, old-fashioned ways.”

“Perhaps,” I said. A bitter thought escaped me. “And I shall be accused of forging my father’s work when what is taken for his work has been my work for a long time. That is funny, don’t you think?”

He did not laugh.

“I sometimes wonder . . . Our father wanted immortality. Did he mean that he wished to live this life forever? Or did he mean that he wished to live on forever in his work, outside of our country?”

That question had occurred to me too. “Perhaps both.”

“The matter of recognition puzzles me. It seems natural that an artist wants it. And why shouldn’t you? I have wondered how you stand it. How did you tolerate all those years with the Old Man?”

I threw him a hostile look.

He paused and then went on. “Of course, you are a woman. I suppose that makes it different. But, Oei, I have learned this much in my life”—he puffed himself a little—“women are not so very different from the rest of us.” How proud he was to make this observation. “I say to myself that perhaps you learned to distrust the desire for recognition. After all, your father spent his lifetime behaving badly in order to get it.”

His statements were simple, and accurate.

“You mean our father.”

“He turned himself into a clown. Remember the giant Buddha and the blood-red chicken feet in front of the Shogun? Remember his perverse pride, pulling fleas out of his kimono while the purchaser rested on his heels? All so he would be known as an eccentric. All to get attention. And you were dragged along with it. This act, this way of behaving . . .”

Sakujiro’s wife slid out the screen and stood listening. He went on.

“Perhaps you made a pact with yourself? To say, ‘I don’t care if people see me as a fool. If my work is ignored’? Or perhaps you thought, This is for him, because he cares so much?”

I didn’t know the answer to his question. Would I have told him if I did? He was good to me, but I sensed that he would do his best to insure that whatever I wanted, I would not get. “Yes,” I said. “It is as you say.”

Sakujiro stepped closer to me.

“Yes or no? You don’t care? I don’t believe it. You want to survive as one brush. You want it known that you were the great Iitsu. Now you seek immortality too. You want it, Ei. You want it as badly as he wanted it.”

I inclined my head. I was perfectly in control. I spoke mildly.

“You misunderstand me, Brother. I care nothing for great fame. But you are right. All people wish to be admired. To be given credit. As I will never be admired for my beauty or my grace, I would like to be acknowledged for my work: Oei made this.”

I knew he’d buy it. As long as I was humble.

But my humility was an act. I lived as my father did, by caustic humour. This was beyond Sakujiro’s understanding. The Old Man’s behaviour—imperious, rude, self-centred—amused me. It injured Sakujiro. And Hokusai was extraordinary. I knew that. So much better than the others. To be in the shadow of one so large was close to being in the sunshine.

“But there is one thing, Brother. One thing you perhaps do not appreciate. One person knew: our father did. Knew that I was great, and sometimes greater than he.”

The smile was wiped off Sakujiro’s face as if with a wet rag.

“There were days when he allowed it. ‘She paints Beauties better than I do,’ he told his friends. Eisen knew. The disciples knew: Fukawa, the smooth one; Isai. They knew. That was the trouble. That is the trouble.”

“Is that what goes on now?” he said, as cold as cold.

“There is turmoil. Who is to be Hokusai’s heir? Who will inherit the seal?” I bent my head again over my painting. A fleeting look of fear crossed Sakujiro’s face. Could it be that I had power now? It was a strange notion but one that grew in me. He too wished to be our father’s heir; but I knew the art, not he. This practice he had despised became daily more valuable through the surprise agency of strangers to our shores.

It might have been this notion that made me speak again after a few quiet minutes. “I am not happy here,” I said.

“Why?”

“Your wife believes I should do housework.” She was still there, stuck against the screen, hoping to be invisible.

“But you have nowhere else to go,” he said.

“On the contrary; I have many places. I can go back to our tenement at Asakusa. Or to Yokohama. Or I can travel and live with students.”

This made him angry. I was not to travel! He spouted all his reasons. It was a dangerous time. Politics! Highwaymen were slashing foreigners on the Tokaido! Only the other day a foreigner was cut down by rebel samurai while riding through a village near Yokohama. There were thugs and barbarians everywhere.

I made no answer, and he went into the house.

I
T WAS NOT TOO MANY DAYS LATER
when Sakujiro’s wife imposed more rules for me. She laid them, in her indirect way, on my brother first. “She can’t walk by the sea. She’s an old woman. The neighbours criticize. If she insists on drinking and smoking, it must be out of sight!”

I heard every word while I was sitting under the stars with my pipe.

Sakujiro came out to see me. His hands rose a little from his sides and fell. Poor man—he was tortured. I could see that although he agreed with her, he understood me too.

“She didn’t like our father either!” he whispered. “You’re too much alike.”

We giggled. I had a good feeling. Perhaps after our frank words, brother and sister had come to an understanding. He knew that I could not wash dishes and prepare meals for the rest of my life.

The next morning, over our tea, his wife called me a masculine woman.

“You are unnatural. You are not a woman!”

She was a sexless creature herself—shapeless, her face pasty, her body constantly wrapped. How such a woman could have given birth to the bright button that was Tachi I could not imagine. She stood in her little kitchen hissing.

“Is that so?” I said.

I really think I frightened her. I had half a mind to tell her there was more woman in my left buttock than there was in her entire female line. But instead I did the unpardonable: I laughed.

“How do you know what a woman is? You think she’s a household drudge? It appears that you do.”

She began putting coal in the stove.

“A woman has a mind. A spirit. A woman also has a body and knows how to have pleasure in it,” I said.

“What a thing to say! At your age!”

I had made up my mind to leave, but I had not told her yet. I was not anxious to give her the pleasure.

T
hat night after dinner I lit my pipe.

“Perhaps you would clear up the dinner food and dishes,” Sakujiro said.

“I’m sure I am so incompetent you would not wish me in your kitchen,” I said.

His wife huffed and banged her pots.

“Why must you be so difficult?” he said sadly.

“I can make a living as one brush,” I told him. “Why would I bother with these old household chores?”

Tachi and I retreated to the garden, from which remove we could hear Sakujiro and his wife fighting. They tore into each other just as my mother and father had done. Unlike our father, Sakujiro did not win.

The next day I tucked my brushes in my sleeve and set out.

I felt pain to say goodbye to Tachi. But we had agreed on a secret code. Whenever I needed to get away and didn’t want to explain, I would say I was going to paint the inn at Totsuka. It meant I was on the road, but she was not to worry. I would see her again soon.

That is what I told them, careful that Tachi heard: a man named Bunzo had invited me to paint the inn at Totsuka.

I went back to Edo.

56

Catfish

THE RUMOUR RAN UP AND DOWN THE MARKET
. You could see it travelling, like a small wind-borne demon: people bent and heard it, then it whirled and ran to the next ready ear. In its wake the vendors began to pull down their awnings. Women scooped vegetables off the grills and piled them in barrels. Those who hadn’t heard shouted to know. When they heard, they clutched their babies. Older brothers yanked little girls by the hands.