The Ghost Brush (44 page)

No one was there. Only the murdered woman-spirit in the trees and her murderous lover, now reconciled in petrifaction. And I was old, after all; they were no sexual threat to me, or I to them.

I took off my kimono, so I wore only my underskirt. I walked with a small cloth for cleaning myself to the water’s edge. I squatted, a shadow in the darkness. I pulled off my undergarment. I could see only the outline of my legs and my arms, but not the flesh of my body. I could feel the steam coming from the hot water and it beckoned me. The air was cold and intimate on my skin.

There were pine torches by the doors of the inn. But none shone any light here. The carters’ dark faces tilted side by side amongst the rocks. I slid in; the water was so hot it felt like ice.

With my hand I brushed something bobbing on the surface, and I almost screamed. I thought it was a male organ, and from the way the men guffawed, they meant me to. But it was a small wooden cup filled with sake floating on the surface of the water.

I downed it and reached for a refill. The men’s voices rose into the canopy. I lay my head against the stone rim of the bath. My body bobbed like that wooden sake cup; my body and the cup and the water were the same.

The moon appeared. Everything was silver and had a shadow. The trees were shedding their bark in long strips, and these hung like hair down the long, straight, thin necks. Oh, oh, it was astounding. They were like my father’s ghosts. I looked straight up into the nets the treetops spread. The stars winked through steam and leaves, sly and quiet.

This was the world and I was out in it.

“Here is the freedom, Strange Daughter, that you have longed for,” the world said to me.

“Thank you,” I replied.

The men filled my cup. I became a firefly, lighting in and out of the conversation, there and not there. I smiled into the darkness. My father would not live forever, even though he wanted to, even though he prayed every day that he be allowed to. Why should he be? I did not wish for his death. But I wished for a life that would stretch beyond his. Was that so wrong? I wished for my own life. That night, I saw it winking, almost within reach.

J
UHACHI-YA SLEPT ONLY A FEW HOURS
and packed up at dawn. A soft rain was soaking the bamboo. Its golden tassels leaned out from secret centres. We moved down through the narrow river valley, reaching a one-street village lit by red lanterns at dusk. A mist hung over Tsumago, caught on the top of the hill. But the sky was lifting: it would clear. I went to a roadside shrine and purified myself. I prayed thankfulness for this beauty. I prayed forgiveness for thinking of my father’s death. He would be impatient to put me to work.

When we arrived at last in a dusty cloud at Obuse, Juhachi-ya put me down first and then unloaded the rest of the bundles in front of Takai Kozan’s storehouse. The women took Tachi off, making a fuss over her. My father came to greet me. He looked older, bent and wizened. “Oei, Oei,” he called, as if I were a long way away.

I took his hands. They were cold.

“Hey, hey, Old Man. How about it?” I said.

“I ya’ ya’ yaaam g-g-goood,” he said. “Bu-bu-but I fell off th’ la-aa-aader.”

It was what I had feared. His palsy was back.

33

Obuse

I SQUATTED BY THE LITTLE GUTTER
of running water. I dished up several cups of it and then rocked back on my heels. The town was on a flat plain with an orchard. White mountain peaks stood up all around—an orange glow came off them as the sun rose. Steam rose from the little stream, and there was a thin edge of white on the grasses. Yet the afternoon would be hot. There was a rumble of wooden barrels from the direction of the sake factory.

Hokusai had perhaps died and gone to heaven and arranged for me to join him. Tachi had been met with kindness and had full days flying kites with other children. We had a little house a short distance from Kozan’s studio with this running gutter beside it. He had taken on a big job, painting the ceilings for two carts for O-bon, the Festival of the Dead. He had made a fine design of waves. But his eyes were not sharp, he was too weak, and now he was stumbling with the palsy. Grinding up the pigments was hard work, and he was not used to it.

The waves were choked up in wooden frames.

“Those are different to the waves at Uraga,” I said to him. “They will be very difficult to run through,” I joked, teasing him. “If you lie down at the edge of the sea, you will be tossed in amongst them.”

He grunted. “A-a-angry wa-waves,” he admitted. “Crowd of them.”

In one of the panels the waves went around in circles. In another they were heading straight up, as if to swallow the viewer.

We named those Masculine Waves. We named Feminine Waves the ones that tended inward. We worked and we laughed together. Or I laughed and he gave his bizarre, twisted barks. I was happy that he recognized two energies, the female and the male. I felt that he was telling me he knew me, deeply, as an artist.

Kozan himself painted the frames. He put angels in them in the Western style.

Sometimes in the evening we visited Kozan in his studio. He played the three-string koto looking out the second-floor window. From here we could see the estate, the neat, narrow passageways between warehouses, the tousled fields, and the road. We could see the pine trees tied up with their triangles of rope so the branches would not bend. If anyone came along that road, we would see them before they saw us.

The room also had a secret door. The door was hidden inside a cabinet and led to a secret staircase to the outside. He could escape unseen, if necessary.

I looked into the faraway mountains, marvelling that I had come through them. Like the glass prisms in Western books, they shattered the light, becoming transparent against the bright slabs of sky.

W
hen it got dark, Kozan lit the small lantern and showed us his books. They were written in Dutch, but there were pictures. Some were of guns—long and short, large and small. For sure we would be punished for seeing these things. I was more interested in the box that made pictures, called a camera. Kozan took pleasure in my amazement.

I had the quiet, those days up in the mountains, to consider myself. I was content in myself. I had no longing. And strangely, men had changed in their attitude towards me. They saw something they liked in my face, my figure. They respected me. There was something tentative, even careful, in their treatment of me. Maybe I had changed. I had aged well. My strong bones gave me the look, now, of a woman who had once been, if not beautiful at least of interest. Little did they know!

Another wealthy patron by the name of Sakai came from Matsumoto. This man’s home was here in the mountains, but he had a shop in Edo near the bridge to the Shogun’s castle. He had many prints by Hokusai, including all forty-six views of Mt. Fuji. But meeting Hokusai was not the purpose of his visit, I could see. It was a pretext. A certain nervous excitement was in the air, and I knew the men spoke about politics. Sakai was a sympathizer with the forces that wanted to open Japan to the world.

W
E FINISHED THE WAVES
. I began to make the deep red we needed for our new project, the ceiling of a temple outside of town. We were also writing a manual about colour, which my father wished to have published, perhaps to lay a claim to these techniques in the face of any imitator who might follow.

A shy boy approached. This was Iwajiro, second son of Koyama, the rice merchant and miso-maker, owner of Juhachi-ya, a well-off citizen of the town. He wished to learn painting.

I agreed to teach him, and we met often. One day I went as usual to his house. The young man showed some talent. I corrected his grip and the pressure of his fingers on the brush, and set the number of repetitions he was to make of a bamboo branch. As he worked I looked through the openings in the screens towards the centre of the town.

Two samurai rode in the gates. They dismounted and handed off their horses and, passing very near to where I stood watching, disappeared into Kozan’s studio. One was Sakai, the collector from Matsumoto. The other seemed to know his way in the little town.

“Who is that man?” I said to Iwajiro.

He looked up.

“That’s Kozan’s teacher, Shozan Sakuma.”

I was impressed, and frightened. I knew about Shozan Sakuma. He was a learned man, a rangaku-sha. But he was dangerous. He had a school in Edo and spoke against the isolationist policies of the bakufu. He wanted a state where our spiritual knowledge combined with Western practical knowledge.

They left a lookout who scanned every direction, turning and turning like a windmill. Hours later they emerged, with Kozan, who saw them off, clapping their backs and wearing a pleased and secretive look.

“Old Man,” I chided my father when I got home, “you are a sneaky old thing. Here I thought you had a peaceful mountain refuge. Now I discover that this little town is a nest of enemies of the Shogun.”

He smirked and kept on drawing his demon-quelling lions.

“You side with the rebels. And you never admit it. You are afraid it will limit you as an artist. I know you.”

He only laughed. He had no sense of danger, and he felt no responsibility to tell me when he led me into it. When he was playing around, he made a stamp with the sign meaning “one hundred”—the age he wished to be, but not the highest age he wished ever to be. He hadn’t even begun to use that yet.

“Old Man, you think you are so powerful. You think that by saying a thing is true, you can make it become true.”

But there were other times when, in the abrupt darkness that came as the sun disappeared behind the mountains, he admitted the day would come when he was gone.

“Chin-Chin, wha’ w’ you do wh-when the Ol’ Man’s gone?”

“I’ll do just fine. Just as I have been.”

He drew little receipts for our payment. He put his face in profile at the top, a cartoon, himself bald and wrinkled with some straight hairs sticking out the back of his head. His ear was a huge upside-down snail. His eye socket was deeply set, his nose straight, and his chin a wobble sinking into his neck.

Underneath he drew me. My face was like a mask. I had a great, wide forehead from which my hair sprang back in waves. I had a dot of paint between my eyebrows; my mouth was a firm, straight line, tending neither up nor down. Strong-jawed woman.

“You ma’ a paper li’ this e’eryti-me. Ma-mak-ke sure get pay.”

He put his stamp on it. “Hokusai, age 88.”

T
he Ganshoin temple was a small, pretty Buddhist temple, which was very old and had been rebuilt a few years before. It sat beside a small pond that was noisy with frogs in the spring. Kozan hired Hokusai to make a Ho-o bird for its ceiling.

The phoenix is an auspicious bird that lives so long that plants begin to grow on its body. We put three kinds of plants in the design. We put leaves of the goyo no matsu (the five-needle pine). These looked like scales, or feathers of the bird laid closely one on the next. We also added fine green laurel leaves and then, finally, two big brown leaves of a plantain plant. One of the plantain leaves overlapped the other. This left a space the shape of a large triangle between them. We looked at this space and noticed that it looked like Fuji-san, the symbol of our country.

We drew the pattern in black ink. This ceiling painting was to be enormous, the size of twenty-one tatami mats. Takai Kozan liked our design very much and asked us to mark in the colours.

When it was time to begin, our helpers laid twelve large cypress panels on the floor, four across and three along. We made a copy of our original design in sumi ink on the twelve boards. I mixed the paints—first the white layer to cover the whole surface. Then, one board at a time, I applied the reds, yellows, greens, and blues—beru, of course and another, very bright. Finally we decorated the Ho-o bird with small bits of gold leaf.

The bird was fierce and tightly coiled, his beak up against his back, his eye powerful and black. He seemed to stare at me no matter where I stood in the room. We called it Ho-o Staring in Eight Directions. My father rested a great deal; he directed me, pointing this way and that, and pretending to be scandalized if I took a shortcut, scolding me lavishly, occasionally offering a single word of praise. At times he knew he was growing weaker, and accepted it. Some days he was confused and could not find his outer garment, or was unable to get up off his knees. Then my heart broke.

On other days he turned on me with a face of stone. “Now what are you arranging for me?” he would say in a poisonous voice. He made me so angry I said to myself, Fine! Let him grow old and foolish. It is time he went! This is too difficult.

Always after one of his angers he would laugh like a baby, his shoulders going up and down, his face crinkling up between mouth and eyes, and I melted and feared the day he must go.

T
HE HEAT BROKE WITH A WILD STORM
that heralded autumn.

It started with a column of grey cloud in the distance. I was walking by the river when the wind hit my back, pushing me home. In our little house I found my father asleep. The wind played around the outside, rustling and pushing, banging a loose gate, making the branches of the pine sway. I placed our painting goods under the mattress. I feared that the roof would fly off.