The Ghost Brush (91 page)

I looked down at my hands. I willed the complacent ferryman to push harder, stroke faster.

“It’s no fun to be the older one,” he had said once. “You’re young and have everything coming to you. I have had most of it. When you’re an old woman you may have a young lover. Maybe then you’ll understand.”

I reached the Asakusa grounds. Crowds of men stood at the doors of the restaurants and teahouses. A street musician was remonstrating with his disobedient monkey, and a little crowd jeered. It began to rain again.

“Entertainment to the daimyo! See it here first. Watch what the noblemen and noblewomen watch in their homes in the High City.” The monkey was dressed in women’s clothes and had been taught to mince and play a flute. A boy passed a bowl to collect the coins that fell with a dull clink from dirty hands.

I pushed through the standing bodies, which were solid and resistant to my pressure. I made my way along the row of small houses with their closed screens right to the end and turned the corner into a side street, now mostly in darkness after the brightly lit market. Three, four doors in was where he would be. I came to a door: behind it I saw a single lamp burning.

When the screen opened I bowed. My umbrella bowed with me, hiding my face. “Is this the place where Shikitei Sanba is resting?” I whispered.

“Who are you?”

The woman stood erect, and her voice was strong. I felt her eyes making holes in my umbrella. I tipped it up and looked into the face. A woman older than me, but not a dragon. She drew in her breath. She rocked back a little, then forward. She knew the situation. She was enjoying her revenge.

“So the news has flushed out the lowlife,” she said.

Her rudeness gave me strength. No need to repent, then. I raised my head. “I have come to inquire about his health.”

“His health is not good. The signs can no longer be ignored.”

It seemed an accusation, as if I had been ignoring signs, as if I were complicit in this illness. I let the umbrella fall and the rain come down on my head. I would drown if she wanted me to, here in the rain. But she didn’t want that either.

“You might as well come in.” She stepped back. I came over the doorsill. From the back came his voice. Vinegar, with angry wit. “Enchantress, are we entertaining?”

“We are not entertaining,” his wife called hoarsely. “We are caring for the sick, and the sick is you.”

“Ah, yes,” said Sanba, and he gave his little cough. “We mustn’t forget, must we?” The cough was stronger. But his voice was no weaker. The music of its bass, the rumble, convivial, the tickle of it, inviting laughter. He’s not ill, I thought. He’s the same!

She saw me take heart.

“Don’t be encouraged,” she said coldly. “Your eyes will tell you what your ears will not.”

“If we’re not entertaining, who has come in?” The voice of Sanba was a beautiful thing.

“It is your girl.”

Silence from the back room. I could picture his sudden childish look of being caught out. His wife swung her hand sideways: go to him.

He was staring at the ceiling. I could see the glint of his bottles: he was using his own ridiculous remedies, his secret elixirs for immortality.

“My old eyes like it dim,” he always said, turning down the wick.

His features were sharper than ever. His skin was a little yellow, his cheeks were hollow, and around his eyelashes there was a crusted crystal substance that made the lids sparkle.

“Sanba.”

“Ah! She’s right! It is my girl.” His hand drifted out.

I was not a girl. I had been when we started. But now I was twenty-two.

I wanted to lie with him and curl towards the warmth of him. But he was hot; the air smelled bad. I was repelled, and anyway his wife was there. And where was the child?

“I tell you what I want,” he continued, as if I had asked. “An outing. We will meet at the theatre,” he said. “Buy sticky rice and take it with us to the Nakamura. But instead of staying all day, we will leave at dusk. We will take a little boat to the Three Forks and lie under the trees.”

His wife stood just behind me.

“Get your father to release you. On the night of the full moon. It is how many days from now? I’m losing track,” he said. “I lie here and try to open my eyes, and the days slide away from me. But I will be better then.”

“Full moon is in five days.”

“On that day I will meet you at the Nakamura. If you can manage to get away.” His attention wandered.

I was forgotten, a leftover doll from carefree, cut-away days that had even then been entirely separate from his life, this wife, this mattress, this stared-at ceiling. I had no place here, and yet the voice, the profile in the dark—it was him. He was mine.

His wife dug her toe into my buttock.

“Go on, speak.” She was asking me to bring him back.

“Sanba,” I whispered.

“Yes.”

“We’re nearly finished the album of laughing pictures. You know, the story about the servant and the mistress who are lovers. And she dreams of taking to the road with him . . .”

We talked about our work this way.

He gave a little expiration of air. “I wish you luck with it,” he said. He said it in a way that showed he understood everything: the work, the dream, even the toe in my tail.

“You are an artist, and it will never be easy,” he said. “If you’re lucky and if you’re clever, you will survive. Promise me something.”

What could I promise? Why would I promise?

“Anything. It will keep me hoping,” he said.

“I promise to make the best colours in Edo,” I said.

“Ah,” he said.

The voice was captive, in his body and in that little house. I imagined I would steal it away. Wrap it in a cloth, in cardboard, roll it and put it in a scroll box. I would free it from this room and from this sickness. I would unroll it when I too lay on my mat staring up through the top of the house, staring into the stars and the sky, or where they would be if the roof were taken off, as if it were made by artists in that lying way, making the inside outside. His voice would be in the stars, and I would go there too. We would look down and see ourselves: tiny, finger-sized creatures in the maze of streets and screens and walls and alleyways and narrow canals that was Edo.

“Sanba?” I said.

He came back. “Yes?”

“If the day is not good?”

“Then we will take a raincheck,” he said. As he said the word “raincheck,” his voice cracked. It was just a small crack, through that low, masculine, scratchy voice. I heard it. As if he might, if he stopped, break down. As if the crust might split and something hot, scalding, true, deep, and violent would break out. I never knew what that something was, what he might have said if we had met as before. That was his goodbye.

M
y face was wet. The wife sat watching me with faint curiosity. She didn’t trouble to be angry with me. The son, a handsome boy of ten, came in. Ministrations were in order. The patient seemed to sleep. I had only dreamed our long hours together, the white paint and the red slashes on the faces of the actors, the lying down and the getting up to go to the teahouse for sake. The grisly murders and black rages we had sat through, with him scribbling and me shouting, were ghost scenes. Real life, this tamed and vapid thing, this yellowed, patchy remnant, had taken its sad victory.

I wormed my way backwards out the door and over the threshold. I knew I had hoisted it only when I heard the rain falling on my umbrella like the crackling of some fire.

M
y father took one look at me and knew. He showed no emotion at what must have been, for him too, tragic news about a friend. He examined the page of waves and passed me a page of comb designs; to him it was boring work, but he could still bring a sense of fun. Could I? A comb was a comb, or was it a view of Mt. Fuji, a bridge, or a wave? Maybe a trotting pig. Pigs were a problem because they had feet. Better that it be a wave. There was a resemblance between a curling wave, its foam a white rim along its top curving edge, and hair pulled over a comb.

We worked in silence. The hardness in my father steadied me. He did not have to speak. What he had to say was palpable: What did I expect? People had wives—that was a given. People became ill. People fell by the wayside, foundered, and died. They were the weak. Sanba had fallen prey.

There was even a sense not of vindication, exactly, but of affirmation: my father had won. Shikitei Sanba, noted expert on the kabuki, satirist and peer, purveyor of the elixir of immortality, had been caught by the demons. He would die, most likely. This was the dirty work of life; this was its not-so-secret destination. While Hokusai went on. He was sixty-two years old—by ordinary measure, already an ancient man. He would not die. Not yet.

We sat working. I felt the impermanence of our surroundings, my father’s imperative to live. Work dried up. Censors got on your trail. Illness stalked. You had to reinvent, rename, and reposition. You had to fight off the oncoming threat. Outlive the others. My father was good at it. He was better than good: he was inspired. From those who were caught, he became detached, as if they might contaminate him.

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.

25

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
1820
s. 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!