“Is there news? Is it bad?”
“News is whatever we make it,” she said. “We must always be hopeful.”
Life in the Yoshiwara was changing her. In the sunlight I could see wrinkles at the corners of her eyes and furrows beside her nose. Her beautiful hair did not shine as before, and the knot was wound in a way that looked several days old.
We reached the bathhouse. The entrance was marked with a carved wooden arrow; the sign read, “Adults, 10 mon. Children, 8 mon.” Shino counted out the square-holed coins. The men’s bath was next door, and the wife of the man who ran the men’s bath ran the women’s bath. The men’s assistant peeked around the wall into our bath; he needed soap powder, he said. But I think he wanted to look at Shino. She was someone you wanted to watch. She was still taller than me. While we both lacked beauty, she had grace. I was short and bowlegged, like my father. My chin stuck out when I asserted my will, which was often. But Shino was quizzical, with that piquant face and frequently downcast eyes. Men liked that. They were misled to think she was meek.
We got our washing cloths and kicked off our sandals, untying our sashes. We squatted with small wooden buckets and scrubbed under arms and between legs, splashing the suds onto the polished wooden floors. We doused off the soap. We stepped carefully along the slippery wooden platform and tested the steaming water. The bucket boy eyed us.
“Too hot, is it?” he said. He was always polite around Shino. Everyone was. “Too cold?” Other women banged on the side of the wooden tub to get his attention: not us.
“A little more hot would be wonderful. You are very kind,” she said.
The women looked up for a minute to hear her accent, before they went back to their pressing conversations.
Across from us were two wives, weirdly featureless, with no eyebrows and blackened teeth, complaining about their mothers-in-law. One had a good one, but she was old; the other had a nasty one who was unfortunately young and stood a good chance of living for many years to come.
“I wonder how mine will be?” Shino said bobbing her head significantly in their direction.
She had in her indirect way told me two things: that she would not be going back to the old husband, and that she would marry. I sucked air between my teeth. “Are you really going to marry? How can you?”
“I received word. My husband has died.” Her face was impassive.
“So you don’t have to send him money?”
“His brother now claims the money,” she whispered.
An old lady bent like a scythe came to the edge of the tub. She had no teeth. Shino stood to help her down to the water. The rinsing boy came up and took the hand away from her. “No, you don’t,” he said. “That’s my job.”
Shino sat down again. She scooped the steam up against her cheeks. She closed her eyes. It was what she did when she was thinking. Or crying.
“But I could be free to leave the pleasure quarter. The blind man—as you call him—has offered to pay my debts.”
I blew across the foamy surface. I slapped the water. “Hey, you! Cut that out!” said the married women in unison.
“In return for?”
“He would take me as a wife.”
The rinsing boy was pouring water on the bent woman’s back; she had small, round moxa scars all over it, from the burning of herbs we practised for healing. I stared gloomily at her.
“If that happened, would you be glad for me?” said Shino. “It would take some time . . .”
Why would I be glad, if she was crying? Why, if she was glad, had she said she didn’t want to know her future?
“It is the best possible outcome,” she said delicately.
I snorted. She was pretending to discuss with me what was already settled.
The woman beside Shino dropped her washing rag into the bath. It floated a minute, absorbing the water, and then disappeared. The bucket boy came, all gallantry, and dove into the deep. God knows what he saw down there.
“Better than what?”
The unspoken possibility of my father buying her, keeping her, freeing her sat in the air between us and then sank into the hot water as well. It would never happen.
“There you have it,” she said. “Izn it?”
Someone again asked for more cold water from the bucket boy.
“No! No cold!” I said. I wanted it as hot as Shino did. Soon I would get out and scrub, then get back in again, one layer smaller. Shino too was nearly ready. Her face had become pink. Her skin had plumped out: maybe she was blushing; maybe it was the hot water.
“I think you care for him!” I suddenly accused. “That blind potato.”
“But why do you hate him?” she said at the same time.
“Why?” I could list reasons: his hands; the unarticulated, dark shape of him, like some huge sloth leading with his nose, picking up her scent from his position amongst the window shoppers; his low, insinuating voice; the doggedness of his attentions.
“Blindness is an affliction,” Shino said righteously.
“Oh, and must we love him for it?”
“We must not despise him for it.” She turned her back and climbed out, modestly making her way to her scrubbing towel. The rinsing boy was ready for her back. I listened to the talk. It had turned from mothers-in-law to hairstyles.
“I had it done by someone new; it’s not quite the same,” worried the first woman.
“What happened to the girl you liked so much?”
“She went back home to the provinces, I heard. Her father is ill.”
“It’s always like that when you find a good one!”
I had to get out. When I did, I turned around and was right in front of Shino, who was cooled and rinsed and now returning.
“By the way,” said Shino, “he has a name.”
“I don’t want to know it.”
A
s always when I was clean, my clothes felt old, and I could detect their smell. I suddenly hated being poor. I had to be proud and not feel it. I had to be more noble than my mother. But I wanted to weep. I sulked and scuffed; I looked everywhere but at Shino. I said nothing, punishing her, until we turned the corner near our house. Then what I had been thinking came out of my mouth.
“Does my father know?”
“It is what he hopes for.”
That was too much. I went cold, as if that rinsing boy had doused me right there, out in the open, fully dressed. “No,” I shouted, there in the street. “You ask me a question: Could I be happy for you? The answer is no! I could not. If you marry him, it will be nothing but another form of slavery. You know it!” I hated Shino then. She was too proud to say to me that she was poor, that she had to survive. I would have scorned her if she did.
At the studio door the cats called to me and switched their tails with vehemence: no one had fed them. I put my foot under the male’s belly and lifted him. I ran my palm along his bony spine and then tossed him away. He prowled the edges of the room until someone’s elbow struck him and spilt an ink bowl. The cat hissed; Tatsu picked him up. He drooped on either side of her hands, his feet splayed in protest. She slid open the screen and threw him outside.
I watched my sisters—innocent of this whole life with Shino. I heard my mother amongst the cooking pots outside. She was a crash-and-burn cook, and a messy one. Hokusai sat like a happy, wiry Buddha in the centre of all this, entranced with something that was flying off the end of his brush—a goddess emerging from clouds.
I saw clearly in my rage. We worked, and he created. He alone was happy. And I—oh, lucky me—was his favourite. The one assigned to my father. My sisters felt that, and it made them dislike me. But they didn’t know what it was like. I had no one but him. And he was changeable and, when he wanted to be, a mystery.
It was a burden to be his chosen one. My mother knew about Shino, but my sisters didn’t. Hokusai’s friends and the Yoshiwara people knew about Shino. I saw them together. It made me an outsider where I should have been an insider. This was my family. But as I folded my legs to sit on the floor beside a cold-shouldered Tatsu, it did not feel like it. He had taken away my family and made me his alone.
And now he would allow his beloved Shino to be taken by the blind moneylender. This made me see his ugly side. As if it weren’t bad enough to have all of us propping him up—and him with a courtesan—now he would let the courtesan be sold off because he couldn’t afford to keep her.
How did Shino and my father see each other? I had no idea, but I was certain they did. Did my father keep another room? Was that one of the ways he spent his money? Did they go, the two of them, to even lower-class brothels so the blind man did not find them? How had they come to the decision that lack of money would separate them, that Shino must be sold once more? “It is what he hopes for,” Shino had said.
So they had spoken of it. Yes, marry the blind man, he must have said. I can’t take you. Here is your lucky chance. A new life any broken-down prostitute would be grateful for. Was that what she was? The elegant, fierce, always patient Shino?
I hated Hokusai then. Why had I been given to him? To him and his lover, who did not even really belong to him? Why didn’t my mother want me? I didn’t want her either, that was true—but hadn’t her rejection come first? My father chose me to help in his studio. Did he ever love me? Or did he just need help? Nothing really lasted with Hokusai. Everything was shed, everything changed; he moved past. It all went in the service of his great passion, this making of pictures, this making of fame. His brush he jealously guarded. And mine too: I could see him laying his hand on my work. It was my duty as a girl to help my father; it was our duty as a family to uphold this man’s little kingdom. Which he mismanaged.
Here was one thing I had in common with my sisters, then: we were broken by his ambition and tied to his work. I must try to love them, I thought. How would they escape but to marry another of these men who eat people’s lives?
I drew a series of round, fat stomachs of men and the ripples of flesh over their ribs—one of my father’s specialties. “The best mother in the Yoshiwara,” they called him. He reached his brush over the edge of his desk down to my level and corrected a line. I wanted to cry. I remembered Shino’s instructions and tried to arrange my face in a pleasing manner. I was never successful. Still less, today. I thought, not for the first time and not for the last, If I have to be different, then I will be different. Not like my sisters—willing to marry. And not like my mother, bleating about how it was impossible for her to get what she wanted. That went without saying. Now I thought, Not like my father either. He was a bad father and a bad lover.
Shino and the blind man would marry. If no other way was found. It couldn’t be helped. But not me. I saw what came for women, and it was not going to come for me. I could avoid it; I could be an artist. As for the love of a man for a woman, in my parents’ marriage it had brought suffering. That was obvious. But with Shino there had been devotion and a measure of joy: I had seen it. It was not legal, and it was not to be bought and paid for, but it existed along the canals and in the dark corners of the teahouses, under the lacquer trees—it was an outside love, an outlaw thing. I would be loyal to that. I believed in it, even if they didn’t.
Crazy, I suppose.
I looked at the line he had put with his brush on my paper.
Much better than my own.
I studied it. My father could still give me something precious. He could teach me to paint. To learn from him, I did not have to believe he was a good man or a fair man. I had talent. I would get what I needed, and then perhaps I could escape.
Sanba
SHIKITEI SANBA CAME TO THE NORTH STAR STUDIO
.
I was near the door as usual, the gorgon at the gate. Hokusai waved his hands amongst the students, intense, comical bald head gleaming in the lamps that lit the dim space. We had moved by then to rooms near Ryogoku. A huge fire had ravaged miles and miles of Shitamachi terrace houses the year before. Our tenement went up in flames, and many pictures went with it. But new shanties, papered with the wrapping from sake barrels because wood was in short supply, grew like mushrooms. They had the advantage of being clean, at least when we moved in. Now a student lived with us. Our pots of paint, our menagerie of restless caged animals about to be drawn, our stacks of paper covered the floor. Cats, made homeless by the fire, circled outside. I tossed our food wrappers their way, and they licked up anything with the smell of fish.
Sanba bowed low to speak to me. Could he come in?
He was that man who spoke to me at the poetry parties. Parodist, drama critic, and seller of face cream.
“Have you come to sign up for painting lessons? Or to see my father’s work?”
“Perhaps I have come to see you.”
“I doubt that.”
“Can you show me some paintings?” he said, bowing again. “What is your name again?”
“My name is O-ooo-ei.” I made the sound that meant “Hey, you!” I had begun to prefer it to my real name. Its street sound matched my raspy voice.
I sounded like a frog in a stagnant pond, my father said. It was part of my general unattractiveness. Did someone once put a hand around my throat and try to squeeze the life out of me? I don’t remember. Shino had tried to teach me to sing, and in singing, to let go of the screams that I never let out, she said. She coaxed my natural voice to emerge. Not much better. It was low and brown, like the chestnut paste the confectioner squeezes out of his paper cones to make little pancakes. At least I would never sing along with the high-pitched women in their baby tones.