“I get cramps,” said Utamaro angrily. “I am older than you are. I am an old man.”
“We are both old men,” said Hokusai.
Utamaro lifted his wrists again and let them fall heavily on his knees. “They will remove these shackles physically, but they will always be on my wrists, heavy as the name they call me: criminal,” he said slowly, adopting it. “They have killed me.”
“No, Utamaro. Not you. You cannot be killed. You are immortal. And you were never afraid.”
“I am not afraid. It is not like in your ghost stories. It is not like that—dragons and snakes winding up at you out of the smoke of burning bodies. It is not like that. That is not fear.”
“What is fear, then?” said Hokusai.
“I can tell you how it starts. It is an evil worm growing within, and because it is growing, you must deny it, and always be boasting.”
My father was listening carefully. His friend had been pulled down. The man was crumbling. I felt the desolation of it.
“And how does it end?”
“It doesn’t. It simply becomes a part of you. It saps your strength. Perhaps there is no end,” said Utamaro. “Perhaps the end is . . .” He raised his hands to show that he meant death. “There is no honourable way to live with it.”
Hokusai said nothing.
Utamaro smiled. “They said you made great sums of money selling to the Dutch.”
I sucked air through my teeth.
“Only once, and it was soon gone. Four years ago. Not great sums.”
“Yes, they were.” Utamaro twitched his head again to get the hair out of his eyes. “I will be honest. This success of yours eats into my gut. It is wrong that the Dutch take your work. I am older and I am greater and I speak for the people more than you do.”
“Not true!” I piped, but my father said nothing.
“How is it, Hokusai, that you are free? It appears that when you break the rules, it is not a problem for the bakufu. Why is that, I wonder? Because you are a peasant and your art is the art of peasants? Because you are unimportant, I think. Or is it because of those noble ladies? Your courtesan has a powerful family. Is that how you get your ability to slip away unnoticed when trouble comes?”
“Perhaps,” said my father, “I am a ghost.”
“Yes, I think perhaps you are,” said Utamaro, jerking his head towards the woman for her to bring the cup to his lip. It was like a ballet, the way he guided her hand with his eyes, opened his mouth in a narrow, elegant slit, and then quickly flicked his eyelids. She tipped the cup suddenly and then brought it back again. A slug of sake went neatly into the slit, and he swallowed.
“How is it for you, child?” he said. “Will you slip away as your father does and manage a kind of freedom? Will your plainness, your strange lack of femininity, save you?”
He had never looked at me with any interest. I was not what he liked in a girl, or especially a woman. Had he been studying me? Why did he ask?
“What will you do?”
“She has some promise as an artist,” said Hokusai. “She will help me.”
Utamaro shrugged. He looked back at my father. “Those with children believe they will be immortal. But you are nothing special. You think you are, but you are not. You are like all of us, swept along with events. Without power, and without recourse. Carried along.”
He raised his strapped wrists and rubbed them on his forehead, scraping the skin so it came away and blood ran down between his eyes.
A
S SOON AS I COULD I RAN,
dodging vendors’ carts and the gawkers and dawdlers, to the Corner Tamaya to see Shino.
As usual Kana was guarding the entry. She was adding up all her expenses in the account book. It was hard to imagine her as a beautiful courtesan. She was unkempt now and thick in the waist, harried and coarse, but somewhere in her heart she had feelings. She smiled to see me. To her, I was just some local kid who liked to visit the kitchen. She did not suspect me of having thoughts. I hung by her desk. I saw a receipt that said a new girl was the property of Jimi. The price he had paid for her was written: two ryo.
“Quite inexpensive, at that price,” I said.
Kana snatched away the receipt.
“She is not intelligent,” she complained. “And anyway, she is addicted to opium. I don’t know why we took her.”
“Maybe you wished to be kind,” I said. It was fun to prod her this way.
“That is just it! Kindness! You are a perceptive child, aren’t you? That is why we are not profitable, not anymore. People don’t understand how risky our business is. How we take these girls in—where else would they go? We train them. Look how beautiful they become, and how useful. Of course, anything could happen—they could get sick and die. So they do. And there is our investment, gone into the graveyard. We have very little profit. We work seven days a week, and the customers are so badly behaved!”
“It’s awful,” I said.
“And the policemen! Every time they’re short of money, they come by the door. They accuse us of some small infraction of the rules and stand by with their hands out. Really! Do you see this column? This alone is for bribes!”
“And now robberies,” I prompted.
“Just as you say! Fortunately that was not our shop. Oh no, they’d never get in here, not with the boy on the lookout.” The “boy” was a wizened old man with a cane who took out the sewage.
Kana looked around and beckoned me closer. “But that, shocking as it was—robbery! rape!—is not the worst. The worst, the very worst, is that my husband keeps on having sex with the girls. It shocks you, I’m sorry. But you are growing up in the middle of this. You’ve seen it all. I told him no! I told him I would leave this place, I don’t care where I end up, if he keeps on with it.”
I composed a look of sympathy.
“Because,” she said, and now a look crossed her crabbed face, a wistful look, a look of hope followed closely by one of defiance, “my daughter . . . We sent her away. To my parents. She cannot live here. She cannot even come to visit, surrounded by all this lechery. Only if he runs a clean shop will she ever see her parents again.” Kana’s eyes welled and she blotted the figures she was making in the long expense column. “Otherwise we will close the brothel. Just close it down. I am thinking of starting a rice shop instead. That at least would be profitable.” She pulled her handkerchief out of her sleeve and wiped her eyes. She touched my arm. I had listened.
I tipped my head towards the stairs. It wasn’t allowed. “Can I go?”
“Run along.”
Caught
IT WAS LATE MORNING
, a quiet time in that world, and upstairs Shino and the girls were practising their “dance.”
They had reason now. There was not so much laughter. They walked like tigers, soft-footed, the way she told them to. Their metal hairpins—those that in all the pictures stuck out of their piled-up hair, indicating their status in the hierarchy (the more hairpins, the more you cost)—were expertly hidden inside their wrists, pushed into their sleeves of their kimono. Their eyes were fierce. Shino led. She glided and thrust her hands into the eyes, the ears (one on each side), the soft hollow under the chin, the heart of her invisible opponent. Jab, jab, jab, block, punch, turn—quickly, like a bird pecking, in, out—and then the pins were invisible again, shrugged away.
“Do not hesitate. If you strike, strike to kill. If you can’t succeed, don’t go forth. If you go forth with ambivalence, you will not succeed.” She moved so smoothly her unpinned hair lay flat over her shoulders and undisturbed down her back. She showed no effort; her step and her long spine were elegant. She was a good teacher—methodical, patient, and firm. I stood there, loving her. Maybe she didn’t suit the stated requirements, but she was beautiful.
A long, exhaled hiss marked the end of the kata. The girls relaxed their fierce faces. Shino nodded my way. She had known I was there. Of course she had—felt sweat off me, probably smelled the road and even the salt water, maybe my longing for her. Sensing was part of her skill. She bent her neck in mock deference: I was still dressed as a boy. In her eyes I saw she was glad we were back.
“Ei! Just in time. You can help us. Let’s see how strong you are,” she said. “Reach out and strike me. You’re going to try to force me backwards.”
I reached out. I put my hands on her shoulders. I pushed backwards. She was just a whippet, thin as a stray dog, but long. She had her hairpins at my throat in a flash; I didn’t even see her move. One elbow had blocked my hands and the other fist was under my ribs. I was off balance and fell away from her.
The courtesans clapped discreetly. Then they kicked the tails of their kimono out from under their feet and got to work. They tried blocking and punching, making it all look like noble deportment. They sank to one knee in the usual way, head bowed, but rising thrust one forearm in a block and slid the other hand, pin extended under the middle finger, deep under the ribs of this imaginary man. They rose and brought their hands together, pins out so they could stick directly into a man’s ears while they knocked his chin with a knee.
“Keep your weight forward. Use your centre—surge up, but stay in one small knot of force,” Shino was saying. “Then you will get him away from you. Don’t let your arms stretch out so he can twist one; keep your elbows in.”
We were carried away with ourselves. We didn’t hear Jimi in the hall. Nor did Shino sense his entry. She failed her own lesson. We all failed the lesson. He grabbed my shirt—thinking I was a boy, I suppose—and threw me backwards. He collared Shino, clenching her kimono in his fist and shoving it into her throat.
“What the hell are you doing?”
The prostitutes stayed in role. Whimpering and squealing like so many little pigs, they dropped to their knees and pitched forward in deep bows, hiding their faces. Their hands dug comically in the heaps of hair to put their hairpins back in place. Except for Shino.
“We are having our dance lesson,” she said calmly, seeming not to notice that she was being choked. She did not look down. She gazed at Jimi, her black eyes serene. There was that unquenched thing in them again that I’d seen the first time I met her, when Tsutaya insulted her. I suddenly wondered what her real name was, the girl who saw no reason to submit, and who had bought herself this sentence.
“Dance lesson!”
Jimi did not see into the depths of her eyes. He was not a subtle man. But he sniffed something; he got a whiff of it. He was a big fish in the waters of other people’s helplessness, a scaly predator. But for a brief instant, he suspected his power over the girls was a charade. A shadow crossed his face. His eyes scoured Shino. He saw only a yakko. He could not see his prostitutes as capable of anything. If he had imagined they were learning self-defence he would have laughed. He knew something was off balance. But he could not grasp that it was him.
He lifted his right hand and slapped Shino across the face. A sharp tool in his hand, a blade to cut his tobacco, sliced her jaw. There was no blood at first. Then it seeped out the edges of the clean cut and stood.
She swayed. She had no other reaction.
He loosened his hand from her collar.
The blood filled the gash and slowly, minutely, began to overflow. He examined it with mild interest. I knew what he was hoping—that he hadn’t marked her and brought her value down. “You’ve done something to your face,” he murmured.
Shino tidied her kimono and twisted her heavy hair rapidly, pinning it in place. Without his noticing, she edged out of range. Then she touched her cheek.
“I am so sorry. It’s a rather wild dance,” she murmured. “It’s meant to follow the drinking competition. It occurs near the end of an evening, as a prelude. That’s why the hair is loose.” She began to put her pins back.
The others remained on their faces. I was on the floor myself; I didn’t want to see.
He must have thought she got off too easily. “Insolent bitch,” he said, lunging forward to take her elbow and twist it behind her back. But Shino was not there. He lost his balance. She knelt, slipping her knee behind his. He tumbled over her onto his side.
For a minute he lay there. Impossible to say how it had happened.
Shino was kneeling beside his head. “I am so very sorry,” she said, “so clumsy. It is my mistake.”
He might have exploded, beat her, if she showed nerves. But she didn’t. “I only meant to bow to you, but as I moved forward you did too, and we collided. I do apologize. I must have caused you to tumble. Please, let me help you . . .”
She looked at me over his back, and in this moment, when her life could have ended, when her life did, in fact, take a nasty turn, I swear she raised one eyebrow. Then she cocked her head: get out!
I ran. Street urchin with the hair of a boy, no one cared to stop me.
W
e waited all day for news. Mitsu finally came back to the tattoo shop where my father and I waited. She said Shino was lucky.
“She was not hurt.”
“Not hurt?”
“Only a scratch. It will heal in no time.”
“Only Jimi was hurt. Izn it?” I said, to make my father laugh. He didn’t.
“What else? Give us the news.”