The Ghost Brush (137 page)

This was a conversation we had had before.

“New ways are coming,” I told her. “I have seen over the horizon. There is another way for women.”

“You have seen this?”

“I have.”

A puff on my pipe made me brave.

“Here’s something else I have begun to think: Hokusai was a good painter, but he was no great master. That was a fantasy we all subscribed to. Just someone we needed to believe in.”

“He was ordinary and he loved the ordinary, and that was his rare, rare gift. His goodness came in spite of himself.”

We argued as we always had. We debated celebrity, which had been the obsession of our age, the ideal we promoted with our prints, and the way we little people of Japan had asserted our rights. We all wanted a little bit of it, and so we strove to improve. Vanity—had it not been a force for the good?

No, no, said the abbess. How sickening was the idea of worldly greatness, in the truest sense, Shino told me. She said it led to corruption of the soul and of all the gifts. It was the root of all noise and distraction, all vanity. It did not bring peace. It looked good only from the distance. All this I listened to and nodded my head and drew in tobacco and pondered.

But beauty, I protested. Was that different? The goal of every painting I made. What was that for? What was its power? Was it simply for pleasure? Or was it something deeper, something spiritual? It had been my grail. I had followed it because it was within my grasp, at least on the page.

She didn’t have answers. They don’t, these nuns.

I
slept in a small room near my paintings. They were such company! The work of my years. I thought about my father and the butterflies. I thought about his simplicity, his joy, and envied it. Bullies do end up being joyful more often than the bullied. It’s not fair.

In the morning I told Shino that I would die soon. I had seen the heads of many men pressed together, moved by one emotion, watching one spot. I was the object of their attention, and it was frightening.

“One must be ready to die at any time,” said Shino.

Sometimes it’s frustrating to have a nun as a friend.

“Teach me to believe,” I said. “I want to live forever. You know the idea: after a series of dialogues with a virtuous nun, I will become enlightened and never die.”

“You too?” Shino laughed. She thought she had caught me out. But I was ready for her.

“Not like my father. He may keep his immortality. He had no peace. I heard him die, and with the last rattle he was begging for just one more year, one more so his art could become perfect. My desire is different,” I told her. “I want stillness. I want cats.”

“Cats?”

“I want permanence of colour. No fading. And no putrefaction! Promise me.” The decomposition of the body appalled me. They studied it so assiduously, those nuns—all nine stages of it, in gruesome detail. They seemed to take pleasure in that. “Do you remember? In the little temple in the woods above Kyoto?” They had to memorize the nine stages of decay. They went from “newly deceased” to “distension” to “rupture.” There were pictures and details of each. There was “exudation of blood” and after that, with a poem, “discolouration and desiccation.” So muddying! Later came “putrefaction” and “consumption by birds and animals.” I didn’t mind that so much. But what about “suppuration”? There was consumption by worms and “shrinkage into a bundle of firewood.”

“You remember them very well,” said Shino dryly.

“Parched to dust, wasn’t that the last?”

“These are the great doctrines. This is the great wisdom of the Lotus Sutra.”

“I don’t care. I don’t want it.”

“I understand,” said Shino. “What can we do?”

“I want brightness. I want my body, old friend that it is.”

Shino was thoughtful. And then she said, “We have a way.”

It had been practised by certain monks and nuns for centuries.

A
t night we went to the hot springs. We talked and laughed and stretched our feet so that they rose in the foam as we had done years before when I was a child. I told her my fears. That they wanted me gone. That my existence had become inconvenient, because how could the disciples forge Hokusai when his original “forger” could do it better? How could they forge Hokusai when the ghost brush was still painting and the works with the Hokusai
88
seal kept showing up?

“I want it to stop,” I said. I pulled the seal from my sleeve. “I would like to leave it with you in the Temple of Refuge, where no man would ever take it.”

T
HE ANCIENT CHINESE
HAD SOUGHT IMMORTALITY TOO
. They believed that by combining yin and yang, dark and light—specifically, mercury and lead, or yellow and the very dark colours—they might get an elixir to preserve the body forever. Shino had some ingredients. There were others that she had obtained from the Dutch scholars. We worked often to improve our pigment, and while she herself did not desire to be preserved, she began to hope that I would be successful at least for myself.

The flowers I needed for the final pigment grew in the fields above Kamakura. I collected the seeds of beni and ground them to a deep, deep red. I sometimes ventured down the mountain to the field of white butterflies, where my father had said, “It isn’t time. Go on, go on.”

I wanted him to recognize that my time was coming. But I never saw him again. Shino walked with me at first. But she was frail. Her porters ran behind and insisted that she ride.

Autumn came. The darkness fell earlier and earlier. It was the Hour of the Monkey, around five in the afternoon—in the old days, the time the parade of courtesans would begin—when we took our last walk. The leaves of the giant trees lay, coppery, pinkish, and wet, underfoot in the lamplight. The damp air pressed down on us. We could see in the west the sky shot with pink from the disappeared sun. Then we saw the moon rising in the east, enormous, glowing, round.

Both moon and sun at once! We knew it was a sign, although we assured each other that we did not believe in signs.

I went to sleep peacefully.

When I woke up there was a crowd in front of my little house. They wore the names and faces of my father; they were his disciples of old and of late—Isai, Tsuyuki Kosho, even Iwajiro was there. Iwajiro, the boy who had been my shadow. My enemies and even my friends were there, a rolling thunder of round heads.

“Give us the seal, Katsushika Oei,” one of them said. I couldn’t see in the dark. “We are the true heirs of Hokusai. We will carry on the name. No woman inherits the seal.”

“You are deluded,” I said. “The seal alone does not make one his heir.”

“If you don’t give us the seal we will make sure that you never work again,” they said.

“I cannot give it to you. It would be wrong. My father left it to me.”

I would have told them that my father was a fiction, that they had named themselves for and followed and set their lives upon a fabrication, and that they too were fabrications as a result.

“We will take it from you, then,” they said regretfully.

I was about to tell them that I did not have it. But I was cut down—a short sword in my ribs to immobilize me and a katana strike to the neck. It was not well done. My head was half lopped, right at the place my neck always bent, like a flower head snapped on its stem.

Blood beat out of me. I lay on the ground. I heard shouting and the guards’ feet pounding. The white gown of the abbess appearing, and her thin, weak body spinning this way and that, performing her ridiculous kata. The men disappeared. I wish I could say it was her prowess with her naginata. But alas, I think she just frightened them off. She looked like a vengeful spirit.

How did they know I was there? Who had followed me? Who had dared to enter the compound of the Temple of Refuge? Maybe they hadn’t intended to kill me, but my defiance, my usual defiance, inflamed them. Too late I recalled Shino’s advice to dissemble.

Shino leaned over me. Her sorrow was contained. This was her gift, the gift of containment. A feeling of ease came.

“Remember,” I said, “no fading. No putrefaction.”

I was heavy, heavy.

The blood that was in me ran and ran; it ran all over the stone in front of the door to the Treasure House and around to the back, where the guards were shouting and mounting their horses for the chase. This river of blood should have left my body empty, but it did not. I was as heavy as ten people when they tried to drag me off the doorstep.

“You cannot move her,” said Shino. “There is only one way for this corpse to be moved, and that is for her killer to return. If the killer returns and takes one hand I will take the other, and she will be light as a leaf and we will bear her away.”

The guards brought back the killer. I could not see his face. He was one of the forgers. It didn’t matter which. They were all the same—all manifestations of the father I had helped to create.

He took my left hand and Shino took my right. I stood and together we walked. That disciple’s face was not clear, but I could hear him. The guards took him away.

Shino and I retreated farther into the temple precinct.

T
HEY HAD THEIR POTIONS
, their pastes, and their medicaments. The chanting nuns laid my body out and washed me.

And they prepared me for paint with the heavy white coating we always used. Every bit of skin—my legs and my arms and the round ends of my fingers, the cracks between my toes, and the pale blue hollow behind my ears. They painted the lips of my labia, those private places that painters had seen before, and in the hollows between my thigh muscles. They painted the ridge of my spine and the bristling hair and slack skin under my armpits; the worn soles of my feet, with their many horizontal lines; my wrinkled, dry heels; my lips and the lids of my eyes. I felt the soft bristles of their brushes run over the stretched and plump stomach skin and the sensitive white place under my jutting chin. I swooned to their chanting.

They had a basin of my red pigment, which was intended to preserve the body. They took me up by my feet and my head, with two others at my hips, and laid me in the water. If a part of me floated above the surface, they gently pushed it under. When I was done, I was red as a berry all over and sealed to fight off decay. They dressed me in my white death clothes and stretched me in my coffin.

They made no record of this body. The nuns from the Temple of Refuge were powerful. I was gone from my country and my time. From my family and my friends. From art and from history, almost.

62

Vault

IN WASHINGTON
, at the Freer Gallery, where all the beautiful prints and paintings hung on the wall, Rebecca and the symposium guests were invited to raise a toast to the grand old man.

People had said out loud that it was impossible to believe all these paintings had been done by one man. Forgery—the f-word—had been uttered. But here they stood with glasses in their hands.

“To Hokusai,” everyone said.

“To Hokusai and daughter,” Rebecca said.

For another half hour they drank wine together—the collectors, the connoisseurs, the scholars, the curious.

She spoke to a photographer and a designer from Virginia: it turned out they had run a writers’ centre in an old amusement park in the eighties. She’d been there. They eyed one another and thought they might even have met, decades ago. There had been a carousel with old wooden horses there. She felt, suddenly, on this impromptu spring visit to Washington to investigate a painter from another century and another world, as if she might be riding one of those horses on a very long, slow circle and was now returning to a kind of beginning: the old friends John and Karen; the babies grown to adults; the days of her own life circling; a new idea taking hold, and something like peace descending.

She was just gleaning, then, that she would make my acquaintance and go on this great romp with me, through Tokyo, London, Leiden, Obuse, and Kamakura. She was not much of a witch, this Rebecca. She could pull out the story, but the myth was hard to uproot, was it not? Could she make me the known painter? Would I be at least a ghost of renown? Maybe I should have chosen someone more powerful. But the powerful have never listened to me. Nor I to them.

S
he walked through the pictures once more to say goodbye. The old master’s greatest works. She stood before the painting
Tiger in Snow,
always thought to be a self-portrait, painted at age 88. It was a beautiful thing, the animal soaring and smiling and weightless in mid-bound. It had that super-fine, almost animated perfection. The Old Man was going to heaven. Or more likely hell. It was a portrait, but he didn’t paint it: the ghost brush did.

And it was done with great love.

The guards stood, legs apart, fists behind backs, waiting for them to leave.

It was hard to walk away from those pictures. Rebecca would never see them again. They were returning to Mr. Freer’s vaults. It seemed a strange fate.