If I stayed face down over my painting I escaped the worst of the chores—cooking and disposing of dirt. Youngest girl but older than the boy: it was a position from which one could abscond, disappear, and I did my best. Shopping was my forte, setting me free on the streets for an hour or two. I loved to walk, and to breathe the wind off the water. Occasionally I caught a glimpse of myself in a polished bronze shop mirror. I didn’t seem to be as ugly as they said. But who could tell what others saw? I modelled myself on the cats, which had no idea what they looked like but lived in their bodies with complete, insouciant pleasure. I sometimes even took the ferry up to the Yoshiwara, stopping to see Mitsu and Waki but never hearing a word about Shino. And I dared not ask.
My father took his time “on travels.” The leaves were blowing sideways out of their branches and the nights were cold when we heard he was back in the city.
“Like an animal to his den when the cold comes on,” my mother muttered with satisfaction. He had yet to darken our door. And he did not: we suffered the indignity of knowing he was back in the city for three nights before he appeared.
O
ne day his shadow landed on my paper. I felt his warmth over me in my cold corner. I began to trace his outline—the top of his head and the small bulges beside it that were his ears. Circles: everything is made of circles, he had told me. I crouched low over my paper and did not look up at him. I heard him laugh with pleasure. He nudged me in the back with his knees—our little signal of secret connection. I kept my eyes down so he couldn’t see my tears.
I had learned to make the characters for heaven and earth, and so I made them carefully, first one and then the other, with my brush and I could feel that he was pleased. “Where did you go? How did you return?”
“We walked one way the whole time—forward,” he said, smiling. “We never went backwards.” It was our joke.
“So is it true the world is round?”
“We didn’t get far enough to find out—we’ll try another time,” said the Old Man, and he and I cackled with laughter.
I
T WAS WINTER
. Cold but dry, the earth dead and hard as rocks. We needed money. My father went to Gokoku-ji, a temple on the edge of the town. He announced that he was going to paint an enormous picture. His disciples cleared a space in the centre of the square—seventy tatami mats by fifty. Tatsu and I were enlisted to push back the people to empty the square. In that space we pasted many sheets of paper together to make one enormous sheet. People stood around the edges gawking. Hokusai brought out a sake cask that was full of
sumi
ink. He had made a broom from hollow stems of the reeds that grew along the river. Lifting his enormous “brush” as if it were as heavy as an axe, pushing it along the paper like a street cleaner, Hokusai began to paint.
He made a circle, then he lifted and spattered the pigment. He made circles within circles, and straight lines next to curved lines. We knew he saw his subject in his mind’s eye, but we did not know what it was. From where we stood, there were only broad and broken lines.
He twirled the broom on its brushes and put a foot up behind him, dancing. The more people laughed, the more he twirled. I worked my way along the edge of the crowd as people shouted out their guesses.
“It’s the coastal highway. The black spots are the inns where you can have a waitress!”
“It’s the mountains to the north.”
Arguments broke out.
“No, it isn’t.”
“Yes, it is.”
“When did you ever see a mountain?”
“There—in the two lines that meet in a peak.”
“That’s not a mountain, it’s a roofline. No, it isn’t a roof—it’s a broken branch . . . it’s an eyebrow.”
People pushed, craning their necks, but from the flat ground, they could not see, any more than I could see, what my father could see in his mind. In the crowd were some of his artist friends. I also saw government spies, and I saw publishers. I saw the priests who commissioned altarpieces and lamps from us. They circled. But the drawing was too large to be read.
The first to climb to the temple roof were the firemen. They shimmied up the pillars and clambered on hands and knees over the roof tiles. Hokusai swooped around with his broom.
From the rooftop the firemen shouted, “It is the Daruma. It is the Buddha!” And it was. The crowd roared. How had he kept its giant proportion in his mind? He was a genius, so they said. He took his bows. And collected the coins that were thrown.
Sanba was there, not impressed. “A simple matter. Anyone could do it.”
So much jealousy amongst these silly men! “Then why didn’t they?”
“They wouldn’t stoop to it.”
“You mean they didn’t think of it.”
“It’s not even so original; there have already been giant paintings by the monks Kokan and Hakuin,” he said. “He did it only to make money.”
“Is that something to be ashamed of?” I flared. “We need money. Don’t you?”
Sanba touched my arm. “You are his loyal daughter; of course you would say that.”
“I am. And if you are our friend, you are loyal too.”
I knew that any artist might have done it for money. But Hokusai didn’t. He didn’t care for money. He cared not much more for us. He did it to be known. He cared for fame. I would go along: I had to. But I understood finally what I’d glimpsed the night I tasted snow in his arms. This ambition, my father’s desire to be great and known as the greatest—not the bakufu, not cramps of hunger—was the true danger.
Theatre
ON AN AUTUMN AFTERNOON
when I was sixteen, Shikitei Sanba looked over my shoulder as I drew the fine temple hairs of a courtesan and her maidservant, who were pictured side by side, in parade. He stood there for several long minutes. I tucked my chin, fierce in concentration.
“Something I can do for you, izn it?” I said. We spoke the chic Yoshiwara dialect to amuse each other. Shino wasn’t around to stop me.
“You can let me stand here unmolested. I am interested in what you’re doing, that’s all.”
I thought of Sanba sometimes when I lay down at night and wanted pleasant ideas to ease my mind towards sleep. I would recall his presence, the way he included me as no one else did, even excluding others, as if he and I had an understanding. Prickles of warmth would come over my chest and climb up my neck.
Sanba and my father had a curious friendship based on rivalry. Sanba boasted that he was the only man in Edo who could live on his earnings from writing. Hokusai said that Sanba was obsessed with sales and cared nothing for quality. He said that Sanba was a hack, that his writing was trashy and borrowed from his betters. According to Hokusai, it was always the cheap imitations that sold and never the genuine. Anyway, if Sanba was so successful, why did he run his cosmetics store, offering secrets of eternal youth?
“Maybe because he really knows the secrets,” I said.
It was true that Sanba sold cosmetics—black powder, red paste, whitening creams—just outside the Yoshiwara. He was the authorized and only dealer for the very popular Immortals’ Formula Longevity Pills. On top of that he had invented his own makeup base, called Water of Edo. My father scoffed and called it eyewash. “He gets it out of the river. No limit to people’s gullibility. They buy it in a bottle!”
But other artists had stores too, like Kyoden with his tobacco. Hokusai himself once sold condiments on the street. I began to suspect I knew why he mocked Sanba in particular. Despite the hack vendetta stories he produced on a regular basis, Sanba was a true original.
A cynic who believed in nothing, it seemed, but his own promises of eternal youth, Sanba had tight lips and frowsy hair. His dry jabs made everyone at the North Star Studio laugh, even my mother. He had credentials too, for having been persecuted. Before I was born, he had tangled with the fire brigades. Our flame-scarred citizens worshipped firemen, who were brawny but none too smart. When Sanba satirized them they attacked his home.
This brawl had given him his start and made him famous. The authorities punished Sanba instead of the troops. He was manacled for fifty days. He showed me his wrists. They bore the badges of honour of the sitting classes, scars where the leather thongs had torn the skin. They were the same as those on Utamaro’s wrists.
“I celebrate them,” he said. Waki had made tattoos of cat claws around the risen, white tissue that circled his wrists and wound up his forearms. Surprisingly muscular forearms.
I wouldn’t see him for months at a time. Then in a minute, like today, just as I was finishing the hairline of a Beauty, he would appear.
I moved my brush minutely, as I had been trained to do. Sanba leaned against my back. I could feel his bony shins on either side of my spine. “Let me take you to the kabuki.”
“I’m working.”
He spoke to Hokusai. “Give the girl a break. You work her too hard. Anyone would think you can’t get on without her.” He coughed his small, practised cough.
He knew how to twitch Hokusai’s pride. I blushed and bent farther over my painting. He said in a loud whisper that went in my ear and also over my head to Hokusai, “She’s got to see some of life, izn it?”
I
t was eleven o’clock in the morning, the Hour of the Snake. The clouds spun across the sky, lit from above as a sharp wind came in off the sea. Smoky yellow and grey moved off, leaving a clear, cold blue. Sanba strode ahead making instructive comments, as this was for my edification. His voice was bigger than his frame.
“‘Edo is the land of splendour, and without it there would be no place to sell things’—have you heard that famous line?”
I had.
“It’s mine,” he said. “I said it first.” He tried again: “There are three places where one thousand gold ryo change hands during the space of a day. Can you guess what they are?”
“The fishmarket is one,” I said.
“Yes.”
“The Yoshiwara must be another.”
“You are too smart.”
I pretended I didn’t know the third.
“And the kabuki district.”
“Ah.” I scuttled behind him.
“Come up, don’t lag!” he commanded. “You are my companion, not my servant.”
The Yoshiwara had burned to the ground. Again. We picked our way over the wasteland of broken timbers and ash, and discussed the rumour that the inhabitants had burned it down themselves. Certain courtesans had been charged with arson. Sanba was on their side.
“Good riddance to the place,” said Sanba. “It’s not what it was. No fun at all unless you like brigands wearing black hoods.”
He showed me a cellar where, he said, prostitutes were tortured. The house above it had collapsed. “It won’t be the end of the cruelty,” he predicted. “The owners have been given permission to relocate for a year, and they’re ecstatic. Things will be even worse: there won’t be any rules in the temporary quarters.”
We passed the area designated New Yoshiwara. Brothel houses were going up faster than shingles could be found: like our tenement, they were sided with the sake-barrel wrappings, a paper in abundance at all times. A troop of blind people with shaved heads moved together across the rough ground, singing out directions to one another.
We got a ferryboat along the Sumida, and Sanba stretched his arm along the gunwale. “I’m taking you from one evil place to another,” he said.
The Nakamura: I had walked by it many times, but I had never been in. It was not only for lack of money but also for lack of time.
“It’s where I am most days. When the orchestra plays the first strains of music I’m in my little seat close to the stage. Although sometimes more goes on in the audience than it does on the stage. I get splashed by water and mud. I never go out to get food. I just wash down a few bean-jam buns with tea. I never get tired of it.”
“Why?”
“It’s an immersion into the whole business of being human, that which Buddhists tell us is of no importance.”
“I take it you are not religious.”
He laughed.
It was opening day and tickets were free. Men were beating the drums from the turret of the three-storey wooden theatre. The outside was hung with prints and advertisements and paper lanterns. We pushed through the sellers of sticky rice balls, hot teas, eels, and souvenirs. The crowd was mostly men, but there were a few women. A lady of the court hid her face under the deep slant of an umbrella, finely ribbed and dyed a beautiful eggplant colour. Members of Danjuro VII’s fan club were lined up with his crest on their kimono, on their headscarves, even on their umbrellas. They were already shouting out praises.
“Nothing to do with the show. They’ve got their opinions memorized,” said Sanba.
Facing the crowd, on the verandah of the theatre, were dancers with scarves tied under their chins. They fluttered fans from cocked wrists. Women were not allowed to perform. These were men imitating women.
“Even so, the law demands that they be unattractive,” murmured Sanba, “to protect our morals.”
We were in no danger.
A man with a yoke over his shoulders sold watermelon. Sanba bought me some. I loved its colour, red verging to crimson to pink, the crunchy flesh, the sweet juice, the black shiny seeds and the way you could spit them.