The Ghost Brush (25 page)

“Oei! Bring the chicken.”

I opened the cage door. The chicken went berserk, flapping and squawking, but didn’t get out. I fished around in the cage with my hand. The chicken fought for its life and I could not get hold of it. There was a moment of chaos. The falcon sat disdainful, its head turned away. The dogs were sorely tempted, but they held. I finally got the flapping thing by its two legs and pulled it out of its cage, not without a great deal of raucous poultry noises, some soft cursing, and a cloud of small white feathers.

Hokusai came to me, his robe tucked up into his belt so you could see his scrawny thighs. I transferred the frantic flapping thing into my father’s hands. The bird hung upside down. Mine won’t be an elegant death, it seemed to say, not like those that had been rehearsed here so often. But it was resigned to it and ceased to flap.

Hokusai reversed the chicken so it was the right way up. It took two of us to dip its feet in the red paint. We got them good and wet. Hokusai walked back to stand at the top of his samurai-pegged paper with the wide blue ribbon waving along it. Then with a great flourish, he threw the chicken into the air. It was too much for one of the dogs, which broke and had to be beaten.

The chicken could not fly. Its wings had been clipped. It settled on the paper and ran. It ran with its paint-soaked feet down the blue and then back up the blue. It saw my father’s feet and veered off, ran back and jumped into the sky, and flapping hard, elevated itself a few feet and escaped out of our vision. But it left its red tracks all over the painting, brighter at first and then fading out to faint stains.

Everyone looked at the paper.

Hokusai presented his work to the Shogun.

“There,” Hokusai said, pointing at the paper. “The Tama River in autumn.”

The Shogun was delighted, and everyone cheered and clapped.

We walked home alone. We were weary but happy that we had won the competition.

“Oei, Oei,” he said. “Hey, you. You did well.”

“Hey, hey, Old Man,” I said. “You too.”

I
T BECAME PREDICTABLE.
I went with Sanba to his writing room, wherever that might be. He had a little mattress there and he would lie down on it, shifting to find a less lumpy bit. When he was settled, he would pat the space beside him and I would lie down. I’d fit myself along his body, he would grunt and pull me closer, part my wrapped kimono, and seek with his bony legs the length of me.

I wormed closer. He put his mouth to my ear, the back of my neck, my shoulder. His lips were warm but his body was chill. I was strong and limber but not much of a furnace. No words escaped me, just a yelp of happiness, now and again, when he stroked me.

What did he think about, making love to Ei? He knew me when I was six. He saw me grow up. In the studio he had seen drawings of my body parts. This was nothing unusual. I believed that he chose me for my spirit, as my father had. There were thousands of lower-class prostitutes, nighthawks, and temple singers: women for view and for sale. But one has to pay even the lowliest of these. One does not have to pay the daughter. But of the daughters, why Ei? The others were worth more, weren’t they?

Whatever else, I had no shame. I was healthy and young and there was truth to me. And maybe it had brought me here, where I was happy.

“You surprise me, Ei.”

“I do? Why?” I said, digging for compliments.

“You are not humble.” His little cough, as always.

I fit myself neatly on top of his penis, which, I am happy to say, stood hard and at a good angle. I sat on his lower stomach, backing up a little on my hands and legs. His face was directly beneath my face, his breast directly beneath my chest and my tiny, upright nipples. My knees were on either side of his hips. I squeezed them and rolled him a little, side to side.

“By that you mean I ought to be,” I said.

I threw off the blankets. My eyes were used to the dark by then. I wanted to see the curved lines of his body against the blanket. I wanted to see everything.

When I rose from Sanba’s bed, weary and collecting my clothes to go home, I often thought of Shino. I had become a woman now. I wondered if she wished she could see me, if she still hoped that I had become elegant in speech and thought, like her. It was the only sadness in my life for those years. She was gone and there was no chance, in that teeming city where the townspeople had no second name, that I could find her.

20

Disciples

I WAS NEARLY TWENTY
. Sanba and I walked in the Yoshiwara late one afternoon. It was a festival day, and many people were gawking. But a wall of black clouds started to mass over the low, wooden buildings with their barred windows and unmarked doorways. Rain began. Umbrellas came out—orange, mustard, green, purple—their mounds and spokes sprouting and knocking one another, and water splashing off at angles. Everyone had one but us. We skipped under the eave of the
ageya.
Thunder, a great bang of it, had all the visitors taking to their heels. The rain pelted. The thunder grumbled as if it might move away but then cracked again overhead. Then lightning—I liked to look at it, roaming the sky, snarling, letting out its white, flickering tongue. We stood, inches from the driving water, under the eave.

Between flashes I told Sanba how my father claimed that once, travelling the Tokaido, he had been struck by a bolt of lightning and thrown into a field. He lay there and could not move for a long time. After that he named himself Raijin, after the Thunder God, for a while.

We waited it out, craning our necks and saying “Oh, my” to each bolt. Finally the rumbles and sparks ended. We stepped out. The crowds had vanished. The rain fell sullenly. We ran through the mud puddles to a tiny teahouse.

The teahouse walls, an earthen red, glowed in the lamplight. There were four seats. We squeezed in beside two young lovers. A child-sized woman stood behind a counter. It was low down, set on the earthen floor of an old kitchen that had once been outside the house. Her daughter asked us what we wanted. Sanba ordered matcha, powdered green tea. We revelled in our snug hideaway while outside the rumbling came back, stones rolling across a tin roof. The woman chattered: how loud it was, and how the people had fled. How all the courtesans must have stopped work—it was bad luck to have intercourse during strong winds and great rain. Thunder over lovers could shorten their lives. There was no escaping the Thunder God. The end was coming, so why run? Izn it?

Sanba said that it was true. “The end is always coming, as long as you believe there is one.” This piece of irrefutable logic was lost on the teashop woman, who was truly frightened. He laughed.

I felt the clay teacup against my lips and the inside of my mouth, and the rich, thick pea-green tea. We were snug; we were protected. Wisdom dictated in such a storm to choose a low place and a low attitude where nothing stood up high to challenge the gods, not even your words. Yet here was Sanba showing his disrespect. “You tempt the gods,” I said to him.

“I’m not laughing about the storm,” he said. “I’m laughing at you.”

“Why?” I said.

“Because you are a kind of joke. The gods have made you a great painter, and they have made you a woman too. They have made you better than your father. It is a cruel joke.”

“What are you saying?” I said. The storm rummaged around in the invisible sky above us. “Not better than.”

“If not better, then you might as well not bother,” he said. “Stay at home and get married.” He knew that was repugnant to me. He gave his little cough and smiled cruelly.

More silence within and more rain without. Two slow, very slow, tears worked their way out of my bottom eyelids. I did not blink.

“Perhaps I am wrong,” he continued. “Maybe it’s not a joke but a tragedy. Whatever it is, I won’t be around to see it.” The rainwater ran over the clay tiles and dripped down the wooden pipes beside the house. I could hear it everywhere.

The lovers got up and went out.

The tiny woman with the round face and the tense smile wiped and wiped her counter again. She dried and polished her dishes. Her daughter worked beside her, and finally they stood still, side by side. It was quiet in the sky. The storm was spent.

We walked into the street. The air was a shade of violet. There was no one out. It was a private time. At the long end of the row I saw a woman step tentatively from her house, her umbrella tipped down over her chalky face. She was far down the row of green houses. I stared into that distance. I wiped my face and found it wet. A feeling had just come over me: that my life was like that scene, a fearful, half-hidden thing just visible down a narrow, dark street.

Then the owners came out one by one and lit the big lanterns, and the orbs of light marched one by one down the row; Sanba went one way and I the other. I asked myself again, Why am I different? Why not like other women? Why was I doomed? Was my father the danger?

This was a new thought. My father was my teacher; I honoured him, and I did not resent him. Only when I was angry did those feelings come to me, and then I pushed them away. I was duty-bound to him. I didn’t like Sanba saying my father was bad for me. Perhaps he was jealous of my father’s hold on me. Must my feelings for Sanba conflict with my feelings for Hokusai?

And was I truly a joke of the gods?

H
OKUSAI HAD LITTLE TIME
for the students who came to us. He collected some of them on travels. They lived in Nagoya or Osaka, and they took their classes in the form of letters mailed back and forth. Others became part of our life and our family. He gave their work a cursory glance and passed it to me or Tatsu. Shigenobu, the husband of O-Miyo, wanted to do things his way and had no patience with my father’s commands. He and my father quarrelled and parted, but O-Miyo and her brat still came to us.

A man named Eisen came to the studio then. He was of samurai background. He excelled at Beauties and wasn’t bad at landscapes either. My father did not teach him but gave him tasks, pictures of his own to copy. He did this to all the men, but with Eisen it was somehow worse. He criticized the affable giant loudly about little things: the speed with which he applied his paint; the mannerisms that—to be truthful—all the disciples had. They had to develop personal tics as they tried to follow, but still distinguish themselves from, the master. Hokusai would not allow Eisen to progress. Eisen was decadent, my father said. He drank and kept a brothel. True, I said, but it didn’t stop him from making ravishing pictures of courtesans.

“He must learn to do proper views of bridges and of deities; it’s what we need. We don’t need any more of those Beauties! You can do them, Ei!”

Before long, Eisen left our studio.

A few disciples who reached a high standard were offered, for a fee, a derivation of Hokusai’s name. We had Hokki and Hokko and Hokuen. We had the beautiful Hokumei, a merchant’s daughter. We were for a time a studio of women. There were three daughters and Hokumei. She was ready to submit to my father’s will, or I should say whims. What else could she do? The North Star Studio was the only studio that worked with women. And we daughters had no choice either.

He saw it differently, of course. The Old Man would sit and sigh and draw furious designs, and pass them out to us where we worked, and complain in a light-hearted way that he was outnumbered. “I am your slave,” he would say. “I only work here. You are the boss!” The opposite was true, but this cajoling kept us happy.

I
HADN’T SEEN SANBA FOR WEEKS
and then a
gyoji,
a government worker, came to the studio. He sat alternately chewing on his lower lip and trying to catch the upper mustache in his teeth. I was working on a design for a laughing picture: a servant was ravishing the wife while the husband looked on. Officially banned, of course, it would sell well. The government man watched, his breath hissing in and out. He suspected he was being made a fool of—but it was always so difficult to tell, wasn’t it? Finally he said, “Did you hear that Shikitei Sanba is ill?”

I felt a shock, dull and pointless, as if I had been hit with a rubber mallet. My father kept his eyes on the painting in front of him.

“We have not,” said Hokusai.

“Oh, yes.” The gyoji was happy to share this delicious morsel. “He had a chest cough that would not go away and now . . .”

I knew that small, dry cough. Everyone in the theatre knew it too: it was his stamp and seal. It came at intervals, a measure in his speech, a gesture giving weight to some pronouncement. Surely this little habit was not evidence of sickness. Did the gyoji know Sanba and I were lovers?

“Perhaps he has a cold or flu?”

“Oh, no. It is more than that. He is not expected to live.”

“Who told you that?” I said fiercely. I wanted to trace the information like a rat on the floor and stamp it dead.

“I heard it at Kyoden’s tobacco shop. Mitsu said the doctors told him there is something in his lungs.”

“What doctor? The students of Dutch medicine? Or the Chinese doctor?”

Sanba laughed at the Dutch scholars, their boundless determination to decipher the body, which he considered to be a mystery that should stay a mystery. He believed in instincts; he believed in signs; he believed in crazy medicaments and potions, even those he invented himself.