The Ghost Brush (36 page)

“He won’t, Old Man. He’s a lost cause,” I said.

S
o he had come again. “You don’t fool me, Old Man. I know who’s paid a visit,” I said. Despite the disgusting fact that this gangster bully had beaten up on an old man with palsy, I was glad it was the devil we knew and not the guards.

When he had his potato liquor he was much better. Then I told him the bad news.

“I dreamed of waves last night and the Dutch doctor in them,” I said.

He rubbed his cheek. He rolled his tongue. These were exercises. But I knew he was listening.

“More than that,” I said, “today in the streets I heard the crier. There was a typhoon in Nagasaki and his ship has crashed on the shore, so he cannot leave Japan. And he has been investigated. All his treasures are confiscated.”

My father was superstitious. This happens when you are sick and always praying for respite. He stared at me with rounded eyes. “You ’a soo-sssooo-ayer.”

“I see things,” I agreed. “But not soon enough. We are in danger. We have sold him our paintings. They may be on that ship.”

W
E ELECTED TO MOVE HOUSE
, again. This time we chose a part of Edo we didn’t know at all.

We had several robes each, a tea kettle, cups, and our painting things. I called a bearer for my father, an incredible luxury, and carried the rest through Honjo and then farther, to where the back streets were not so crowded. The little dark rooms that we stepped up into from a back street were identical to the ones we’d left. No one hailed me when I went out for grilled eel. We didn’t even tell our publishers where we were.

But we were too starved for news to stay hidden for long.

“You always said the best place to hide is out in the open,” I said to the Old Man one restless morning. “And no one will be looking for us in the place we are most expected. Can you walk?”

To my surprise he got to his feet easily. We walked across to the river, my father with his straw hat low over his face and leaning on the bo. We took the ferry to the Yoshiwara. Just at the gate was the big banquet hall.

The wooden noticeboard in front announced the event: “Today, Poetry Party, 3 p.m.”

I loved the ageya. It was huge, one hundred tatami mats. From the street you saw only dark slats of wood with squared-off lattice windows made blank with white paper. If you looked up you saw the roof tiles on the first and second storeys, curved to ripple like small waves; the ends were impressed in the owners’ crest—mulberry leaves under a temple roof. Bronze lanterns lined the wall that faced the street.

The inside was cool, freshened by the high roof with its slit opening for smoke. Filtered daylight fell on the wooden floor near the windows, but the centre was dark. I could just make out the racks on the walls, where the swords of visiting samurai lay harmless side by side.

As we entered voices chimed out, “Hello! Welcome!”

“Hokusai! Old Man, what are you doing? Have you designed any new prints? Are you working on a book?”

“No, no,” my father said. “Nothing new.”

“Never quite what one had hoped, this life,” said the owner.

From the entry I could see into the kitchen with its cauldrons of steaming water, the iron kettle, the bucket and well. Cooks moved deep in concentration, their sweatbands printed with the temple and mulberry. The owners came hurrying with hands together to greet us.

They were the fifth generation; they had rebuilt the ageya on the ashes of the original after it burned with the Yoshiwara. We went down the hall to the “fishing net room,” with its ceiling made of woven strips of wood. On the walls were paintings of Chinese children playing with kites, touched with gold leaf but sooty and dark. I lit my pipe. The press of bodies increased. No one said a word about our notoriety, or mentioned our friendship with the Dutchman who was now a prisoner of the realm. We were welcomed, the two of us.

Poor Waki the tattooist was showing his watercolours: he had no talent, but he was determined to make his name. After him came a literary-style brush poet, some parodists, more painters unrolling scrolls.

All afternoon we drank tea and ate soba noodles, my father’s favourite. We ate pickles and grilled fish. As the light failed the waiters brought in tapers so we could see our fellow artists gesticulating in their hour of glory.

Finally it was night and the little candles on the low tables gave a glow that outlined every head, every set of shoulders, every forehead with gold so it stood out against the dark. The high ceilings rose above and through the air holes I could see stars. It felt like earlier times. I knew that this safety was a temporary thing, and so I loved it all the more.

Into our midst with a clamour of greetings and cries for drink came a group of scholars of Dutch. They had news.

“Court Astronomer Takahashi, known as Globius, has been arrested! He has been denounced by Mamiya the explorer!”

These were the men I had seen in the entry rooms of the Nagasakiya. “What for? What does Mamiya say that Globius has done?”

“He traded maps of the secret reaches of the kingdom to the Miracle Doctor, who would have taken them out of the country had not the God of the Sea risen up.”

How quickly they dropped their sophistication and spoke with the old beliefs.

“Someone has informed on him. Someone he trusted.”

The tailor beside me spoke. “These are the intrigues of the powerful, always trying to do each other down! Who cares?”

A sombre, downcast line of geishas moved in silently and disappeared behind the rolled blinds on the stage. Then the blinds were lifted to reveal them. I watched their white faces: how garish they looked. I recognized their special gaze, false but pleasing to men. I wondered how men could be so easily fooled, or if they were fooled by the geisha’s forced delight.

The music began. I swayed in my own world, like the soothsayer at the foot of the bridge with the crowds clattering past her. I moaned too perhaps. We had been drinking all day. The smoke from the fires and the pipes hung in the damp air: my legs felt cramped. I stood and excused myself.

In the enclosed garden two old pine trees leaned together, one with a thick limb that grew horizontally, nearly on the ground, for the distance of ten long steps at least. This limb was propped up with bamboo crutches. I loved to stand in that little courtyard. There was a cat, winding himself along the wooden poles, then darting under the planks. Rain was falling; thunder came and, close after it, lightning, which set our fellow listeners to a frenzy of murmurs and oaths to protect themselves. Better yet, drink up.

Inside, the men came to lift the small tables away for dancing. My father and I paid for our food and pushed our way out through the sweating bodies to the street. The rain had stopped. Everything was shining through the fog. The lanterns at intervals over the narrow walk threw their yellow light down, making a pattern of light and dark.

We looked overhead for the Seven Stars. But they were not there. We had a long walk ahead. My father was slow and one leg dragged. He leaned against me. We were both silent as we breathed the night air and stepped in and out, in and out of visibility. The boatman was kind and took us up the river near to our new house.

I
T WAS WEEKS AGAIN
before I could leave my father. But some small work at last found us—a pair of demon quellers for a temple fair—and two students came to complete it. I made my way to the Ichibee bookshop, where the gossip from Nagasaki would be fresh. The postal runners had been slowed by uprooted trees on the Tokaido. But finally they had arrived. They had little news. I asked about von Siebold’s wife. Was she hurt? And the child, who must now be four years old? No one knew. What about his collections? His paintings—our paintings (my paintings)? Had they been on the ship that blew ashore?

The Dutch scholars who gathered there were not sympathetic. They pronounced the Miracle Doctor’s powers evil. He had committed many transgressions. Measuring the height of Mt. Fuji was perhaps the worst. These were men who had flocked to his door—publishers, medical men, merchants. Artists who had tried to sell him their work. How quickly they deserted their hero. It was, I realized, a form of self-hatred. The all-knowing Dutch doctor would now fall into the hands of the same powers that kept us ignorant.

“But I saw you lined up outside the windows of the Nagasakiya,” I said to one of them.

“You must be mistaken.”

I understood that these men thought there were spies amongst us. But could I be one? They went on listing his crimes.

“He had a detailed map of Edo.”

“He had a linen cloak bearing the imperial coat of arms.”

Collective gasp of horror.

“How did he get that?”

“Genseki gave it to him in exchange for medicine to dilate the pupil of the eye.”

He had a copy of the Shogun’s secret map of the island of Karafuto at the edge of Russia. The Europeans called the place Sakhalin and thought it was a peninsula. Von Siebold’s copy was even better than the one held in the Imperial Library, they said. Mogami made it, and Mogami traded it. Now he had confessed and called von Siebold a spy.

But why had Mogami turned?

Because he himself was caught.

Mogami accused Globius as well. Globius had been discovered with a book about Napoleon and a map of St. Petersburg. This was taken as proof that he had been supplying Japanese maps to the foreigners. He had been thrown in jail. His teeth had been smashed in the initial beating. This was so he could not bite off his tongue.

The court astronomer’s crime was punishable by death. He was under watch so he could not kill himself.

Ah yes, that pleasure would belong to the Shogun.

T
HE CIRCLE OF THOSE UNDER SUSPICION GREW.
Soon, fifty people—half the learned entourage of the Shogun—had gone to jail.

The Miracle Doctor was taken in handcuffs on the long journey back to Edo. The old information that von Siebold had gone to school in Germany and spoke High German better than he spoke Dutch was dredged up. He must be a spy, they said. He had aimed his telescope and his sextant at Fuji-san. He had been in the Shogun’s library. He was asked, again and again: “Are you spying for the Russians?”

“I have never met a Russian.”

“Why have you stolen the linen coat decorated with the imperial coat of arms?”

“I have not stolen it. It was given to me.”

“Who gave it to you?”

Von Siebold would not name Genseki the court physician or explain what they already knew: that it was given in exchange for the recipe for the medicine that dilated the pupils of the eye, so Genseki too could perform the magical eye surgery.

“Why did the court physician want your medicine? Is it superior to Japanese medicine?”

He knew there was a wrong answer to that one. All cures came from the divine, with the Shogun’s permission.

“It will work with a little skill and your gods’ permission.”

“Why did you measure the height of the sacred Fuji-san if you are not a spy?”

“I propose no illegal use for this knowledge,” he said. “I measured it for the pleasure of knowledge.”

It went on for a year.

W
E WERE NOT THERE
to see the end. Our temporary rooms far east of Honjo were not far enough out of the way. Our trade with the foreigners—always an irritant to the authorities—had become an offence. One day a messenger from the Shogun came looking for my father. He unrolled a picture. It was one of the studio works.

“Why did you paint the walls of the castle and give it to the foreign spy?”

Hokusai was insulted. He had never seen this painting. It was one of those that were intended to illustrate how we lived. It was not very good, I knew. The black stone walls loomed and in front of them was a fire, that was all. In my mind it was a fire of woodcut blocks; it had to do with the censors. My father had never paid any attention to it, in truth, as I had painted it. And it just so happened that his symptoms were rather bad that day. “Thz pchr not me-me-my-mine,” he said. “’Tz bad. You c’n see, no”—he rattled his hand as if he were signing his name—“n-n-no.” He made the gesture for stamping. His eyes looked ill that day, round and popping. It was clear he could not have done the work.

I sat with my head bent and my eyes cast down: the gloomy, divorced daughter. When the messenger was gone I laughed and clapped, and my father rolled on his back and kicked his feet. What a joke.

Nonetheless, that night we walked out of Edo. We had discussed it: while one messenger might be embarrassed to accuse a sick old man and his strange daughter, the next might not. And now that it was known where we lived, there would surely be more visits.

Hokusai was feeling lucky that we had no possessions.

“You see, Daughter, we would just have to carry them on our backs,” Hokusai said. He was markedly improved.

We turned our backs on the sprawl of wooden houses and the black, curving walls of the Shogun’s palace. We took the ferry as far as we could. Then we began to walk, as we had walked before. We passed the jail. We passed the Punishment Grounds. There was a body on the cross. The birds were crazed with it. Strips of flesh lay around its feet, too big for their mouths.