The Ghost Brush (27 page)

But why was I thinking about my father? Sanba was leaving me. I could feel it. It was in the air. It was in the cock’s crow that came before long: dawn. How many days would it be?

When I was too tired to sit I fell forward onto my crossed arms. I hunched over the floor, my eyes closed against the flesh of my forearms, and waited for my father to berate me.

He didn’t. When his hand came, it was a surprise. It was a heavy hand, just there on my right shoulder, at the back near the nape of my neck. It was a kindly hand. A touch one might give to a fellow-in-arms. It was the hand of one warrior to another, admitting me to the whole of it: life, death, art. And survival, especially.

His hand warmed me. Then he nudged me upright.

I wiped my face on my sleeve.

He took the comb designs and looked them over. Hmm, he said. And, Haaa. Ahh. He liked them. I went out to the well and splashed cold water on my face. When I came back inside, he looked at me and seemed to see me afresh.

“You must marry,” he said.

21

Husband

THERE WAS ANOTHER PAINTER
in the North Star Studio. His name was Minamizawa Tomei. He was the son of an oil seller. He was gentle, with the eyes of a child and a shuffling gait. He longed to work with Hokusai. But my father could teach only those who taught themselves. So I worked with Tomei instead and he relied on my example.

I liked him. At the sake houses after work, he was company. We listened to the women with their heads bent over samisen. He sang like a bird. We clowned together. Since Sanba’s death, I was the punster.

My father asked us one question after we announced our intention to marry: “Why do you drink sake?”

“To let go of the hours of the day.”

“Ah! I see!” he said. “Not me. I wish to hold on to every minute.”

I
was cruel to my husband. Some people said, “Oei is the daughter of a master and she laughs at the no-talent son of an oil seller.” That is another of the scurrilous accusations of history, and I dispute it. I married him for friendship. It would have been worse if I hadn’t.

I was young and felt old, as if I had lived a famous life already. I had been the companion of Shikitei Sanba, and people crowded our table after the theatre. But with Sanba gone, I was cut down to size, married to a man who would never add up to anything. He was gentle, it was true. He was kind; that was odd. Young women often have an unfair reaction to kindness: when someone is unfailingly so, they are not grateful. They begin to despise that person.

Ah, kindness, Sanba would have said. You hear about it—isn’t it a kind of skin rash? Can it be got off with soap?

I shaved my thick eyebrows on marriage. This widened forehead, as we called it, was the only obvious change in my life. You could still see my frown; it was carved into my flesh. I still went drinking. I was missing love. I took to pulling strands of hair from the tight knot at my nape and chewing on them. I rubbed my eyebrows where the stubble grew back in. When I walked out in the morning to buy breakfast, Sanba’s form—that particular slope of his shoulders and his languid, narrow gait—went ahead of me, stepping sideways out of the traffic into a bookshop.

I dodged into that nook where new volumes lay. I let my eyes run over the latest prints of Beauties by Eisen and Hiroshige—beautiful but without energy, without sympathy. Simpering, lank figures with bloated faces. My father was represented by his books of instruction: Manga, series VI and series VII. Blind People. Skinny People and Fat People. Good but silly. A horse bucking and a woman in black on high clogs, standing on the rope that tethered the horse. We were in the 1820s. He was perhaps fading. “Hokusai will not die,” Sanba had predicted. “He will go on for a long time. He has ingenuity, and he has you.”

Under the counter, contraband but available to everyone, were the shunga that my father, and I too, painted: couples grappling, huge nether parts waving in the breeze as clothes parted conveniently. Not like the sex in my marriage!

I was supposed to be grateful to Tomei for having me. But I dismissed him with a short expulsion of breath in the top of my mouth: “Ugh!” He brought me tea: “Ugh!” It was cold. He put brush to paper: “Ugh!” There was too much ink.

Nothing disturbed his good humour. He smiled, taking his eyes off the page and letting the ink spread out from the tip of the brush.

“Now you’ve ruined it.”

He tried to kiss me when I was annoyed. Whereas I wanted to kiss him only when he was cold to me, and he never was.

“Come, let’s go out to eat eel,” he would say. “I have money today. We can walk along the riverbank.”

My shoulders rose and I bit my lip. “You’re bothering me. Can’t you see I’m working?”

It was not his fault: it was only that he was not Sanba. He didn’t know about Sanba, but he ought to have. People did. He didn’t pick up clues from my experienced behaviour on the futon. But he was a child, a dreamer.

To add to my crimes, then, I made him a fool. I knew that. Some days I couldn’t look at him. His delight with a piece of watermelon, the sticky, sweet water running down his chin—I had been that innocent before. The way he clapped palms with the man who sold divining poems written on little bits of paper. And that sheepish laugh, huh huh huh, his shoulders lifting as if they were strung up.

He was sympathetic to awkward children. He would spend an hour over sandals with a broken sole. “Throw them out!” I’d say. “I don’t know why you became an artist at all,” I said, standing beside him one day as he knelt on the road, picking up coals from the remains of a cooking fire that had been kicked over. “You aren’t really interested in art.” How had I become so stern? “You’re only interested in broken things,” I said in disgust.

“I am interested in broken things,” he said. He smiled and I thought, He’s going to say it’s why he likes me! “But you are not broken, my pumpkin. You are strong and whole.”

He had read my mind. Unforgivable. I made a face.

He kissed me. He loved me! Why? Why? I wanted Sanba, but Sanba was dead. In a candid moment I told Tomei that the way to get my love was to be cold. Mock me. “Only boil in secret and in the dark,” I instructed.

But he boiled at low temperature, in no time and without shame. And then he boiled over. He tried to make me “vanish,” the term we used in shunga for climax. Nothing. “It is not your fault,” I told him, taking pity. He fell away from me. I was a bad clam, the one in the broth whose shell would not open.

I wanted to extinguish his love for me.

Of course, when you truly want that, you will finally get it. After a time Tomei smiled less on me. I was killing his love. Immediately I regretted it. “Don’t give up on me,” I would whisper to him after he fell asleep. “I’m trying.”

T
HEN CAME THE TIME
when the public did not want Hokusai’s pictures. He had a bad year, and another bad year: all those years were bad. Troubles came to us and stayed. Have I enumerated the deaths in my family? The first was my father’s son by his first wife; he, who like my father himself had been adopted by the Nakajima family, who were possibly his blood relatives, to be heir to the mirror-polishing business. But unlike my father, my brother had made a success of it. When he died, with him died the sum of money we got every year from his employer.

My sister O-Miyo, married to the drinker and gambler Shigenobu, finally ran for her life to the divorce temple. She returned with her son to live with the family. The boy was trouble. She sent him back to his father, but that was not good. His father did not like him either. He roamed the neighbourhood, bullying younger children and the harmless poor. I saw him try to choke the fee collector at the shooting range when he was not even ten. Then O-Miyo developed a wracking cough. She died when she was thirty. The boy was ours. My mother tried but could not control him.

And Tatsu. We watched her fail. I would squat behind her and wrap her chest in my arms to hold her erect while she went into coughing spasms. I tried to pass on the warmth of my heart, my strong spirit. Sometimes blood splattered out. She couldn’t paint then. We missed her work and the way she organized us. The papers went into their former flyaway piles in corners. Her death was a disaster.

Hokumei, too, the merchant-class woman who had brought an air of delicacy and decency into our workshop, had her brief flight of productivity and then left us. I slept at home with my husband but lived from early morning until night at the North Star, where I ran the studio. I had a few students of my own by then. One was Mune, daughter of Hokumei. She became my friend and filled a little of the emptiness my sisters left.

As his women faded away my father stopped laughing. Fellow artists and even disciples seized the opportunity to rise against him. Eisen, whom he had rejected, was now succeeding. Hokusai accused him of taking work that should have been ours. Masayoshi accused Hokusai of being a copycat; a certain former disciple called Dog Hokusai forged our work. I had to write a letter to our Osaka publisher on behalf of Hokusai: “My disciple Taito II is selling his paintings as ‘by Hokusai.’ That is unspeakable. Please make it stop.”

When my father wanted work done under his name, it was by me.

O
ne day I came in to see Hokusai trembling on his side. He flopped his right arm out and shook it. It was loose, like a dead branch.

“How long have you been sitting there?”

His face twisted and his words seemed glued inside him.

“I yam p-pa-ar-lyzed,” he moaned.

It frightened me.

“You are not paralyzed! You’re moving.”

“I caa’an stan up.” He jerked around, trying to get to his feet.

I helped him stand.

“I waaan wal-kit off.”

He began to limp in little circles. I began to giggle. I thought he was clowning. I thought he had simply put his limbs to sleep by sitting.

“You’re paralyzed but you want to walk it off?”

“I’m wal-kit off, wal-kit it off.”

He dragged his legs and his breath was laboured. But he kept going, his face a mask of determination. I watched him. Then I knew. Suddenly he was the old man he had claimed to be since my birth.

“Maa-ke me sit. Sit!”

In those days he did not have a desk to work on. He used the top of a rice caddy. I pushed it in front of him and gave him his brush.

His brush was jerky and rigid. That made him angry. “You do it,” he said. “Liiie tha, no liie tha . . .” He wanted the line of the back thicker; he wanted the curve under the arm thinner. “Liiie tha. Yes. No! No! Noo dry bru stro—”

That was how it began.

W
e thought the palsy might be the end of him. It seemed to go on and on: the great man in this paralytic, spitting, jerking state. He hated being incapable. I was the only one with patience for him. Together we made designs for books of his “famous painting style.” I held his hand while he sketched mountains and trees and fishermen casting their lines into the sea—bald, smiling fishermen basking in the sun.

He told me a legend.

He sketched a bare hill and, behind it, a series of hills with narrow valleys between. “’S a grea’ army through t’ valley. It go-s to co-on-onquer far lands.” He drew the army caught between snow-covered mountains, where nothing but rock, ice, and the small, dark tips of buried trees were seen. The army lost their battles. They even lost their enemy. But the general and his troops pressed on. The general walked. His horse walked beside him, exhausted because the snow was deep.

The general had no advisers left; they had fallen in fatigue. All he had were these rows of mushroom-like men—my father’s arm was improving. He drew each face in the ranks under a shallow straw hat. The army stretched out of sight in the cleft of the farthest valley.

The great warlord was alone in the world. “So h’ asss-k he horse. Unnerstan’?”

“Yes. He asks his horse what to do.”

“Rii-t. ’E says, ‘Ho-oorse, what you think? We go on? Or we go ba-aack?’”

The horse too was old. He had been waiting many years for this question. Now it had come.

The picture grew under my father’s brush. He held his stiff hand with his good hand and drew lines. Each strand of straw on the soldiers’ raincoats and each flagstaff, each rock or treetop protruding through snow, each small disc of hat in that huge army, he drew.

Ahead of the horse were no footprints. Behind him were the general and hundreds on hundreds of men. In his spine and the angle of his head and the way his eyes followed the ground, the horse from my father’s brush expressed his weariness, his resolution, his careful retreat.

The men held their flagpoles high, but the fabric was tattered. Their small feet in black leggings wobbled on the uneven, trodden surface and amongst the footprints of those ahead of them. The warhorse watched the ground in front of him.

“If we go on, we’ll be the conquerors; we’ll be the emperors. We’ll have gold and glory and be celebrated for our bravery.” The general let the reins drop. “Or should we turn back? If we do we reach home again.”

The horse did not have to ponder. It turned and began to plod home, riches and glory of no interest.