The Ghost Brush (124 page)

The ceilings were perfectly preserved. There were two panels: one was Feminine Waves and the other Masculine Waves. The feminine were circular; the masculine were linear. It was easy to see how the father, in his eighties, needed help with the work. The panels were each more than ten square feet, and the colours were deep and intense oils. Each was framed by a width of patterned work with feathers, fruit, and flowers. “They say that Takai Kozan assisted,” said Hart.

Rebecca had imagined Hokusai and daughter reunited, laughing and making bawdy jokes about the male and female bits. But the facts were different. The “male” and “female” names came later. When they were painted, these were called Angry Waves. They swirled around and around, in a vortex. Trapped, unable to get out, the waves seemed to eat each other.

Their next stop was Ganshoin temple, a short way out of the town. There was a small pond and a sign in English. “Every year in the season of cherry-blossom viewing, countless frogs appear in the small pond. The male frogs like to assist the female frogs in their reproductive duties,” it said.

The Ho-o bird was a colossal painting, nearly sixty-five square feet. It too was in the ceiling.

“How did they even paint it?’

On the ground, of course. Its twelve panels of cypress wood were painted first and then lifted and attached to the ceiling. Even assuming that others did the lifting, the sheer size and density of colour of the painting made it impossible to see as the work of an eighty-eight-year-old—especially one whose “palsy had returned.” “It’s a tremendous effort, even to make the paint,” said Kubota.

They stood looking up. The phoenix was wrapped around itself, it too in a vortex. Plants were growing all over its body. They were deep green, red, blue, and black—the dense jewel colours that were Oei’s trademark.

The pamphlet made no mention of Hokusai’s daughter. All credit was given to the old man. And the ghost was silent.

A
nd finally, the miso factory.

Rebecca, Kubota, and Hart the translator arrived at the storefront, which looked like an old-fashioned butcher shop with its immaculate counters and packages of fresh miso under glass. A tall man with a square, smooth, open face greeted them: Koyama Hirofumi. His family had been making miso in these same quarters since
1784
. The family business was known as Juhachi-ya, the Eighteen, because its goods were continually flowing through the eighteen stops on the road to Edo.

He took them to his small private room. They bowed and knelt. He served them tea and chestnut sweets that looked like tiny mountains with streams running down their sides. They were delicious. Koyama-san explained that his family records were kept in the adjacent storage room.

Rebecca knew that Japan’s historical records had been ravaged. After the Second World War, Tokyo was burned to the ground; the occupying Americans emptied the libraries. Japanese scholars had to go to the Library of Congress in Washington to find documents. But she was beginning to understand about the protection of the mountains. Here, away from the city and the earthquake zone, it was another story: families maintained continuous professions and held on to their homes and their documents for centuries.

Twenty years ago, Koyama-san told his guests, he had become curious about his ancestors. He’d looked through the family storage rooms and found the letter from Oei—a copy of which they had seen in the museum. Around
1862
, the Koyama family were curious about those magicians who had arrived in the country with a camera. A younger son had gone down to Edo and got his picture taken. Koyama-san produced it: a young man with a sombre face; dark, sepia-toned skin; and stiff, shoulder-length hair that stood out from his collar. He had mute, powerful eyes.

Iwajiro was the second son; since his older brother was to take over the miso business, he was free to take art lessons. He had asked Oei to be his teacher. She continued to instruct him, through letters, after they left Obuse. These facts were locally known. It seemed obvious that the recipient of Oei’s letters was Iwajiro.

But he had found no work by Iwajiro. There were some practice papers, but nothing complete.

“Odd that he did not keep his work,” said Rebecca.

Koyama-san said that Iwajiro was forced to give up painting: his older brother died young, and as second son, he had a duty to take over the business.

But there were other treasures in storage, untouched and unseen for
150
years. He brought them out.

First was a red screen with paintings glued on it.

“Oei did this one.”

D
ID I?

It was simple, a painting of lilies. I tried to remember. The lilies were white, tipped up; two were in bloom, with the other in bud. I could see the dots of paint that made up the slightly dappled skin of the petal. I could see the fine red-orange dots of the stamen and the pollen of the lilies.

I had nothing to say. I didn’t remember this piece. It may have been a model for Iwajiro to copy. This had been my father’s teaching method, and while it was a little bit lazy, there were times when it became part of mine. With Iwajiro, I worked through the mail.

It was a pretty flower. Rather pale.

But that was not all Koyama had found.

He brought out a small wooden chest and folders of papers. The papers were brush exercises. He set them on the floor. He opened the doors and drawers of the chest. He pulled out bundles of tissue. He unwrapped them to reveal little white paint cups with dried paint still in them—yellow, orange, and red. He pulled out a cylinder of brushes and set it beside the pots.

“This is very important,” murmured Kubota-san.

After that, there was silence.

My colours were still bright. The brush ends, each hair clean, dry, separate, stood like tiny antennae in the air.

Koyama-san knelt in a posture of nobility beside his treasures, which he had brought out to show a writer from across the world. Nobody moved. He seemed to say, Interpret this as you may.

I yearned to pick up a brush and dip it, to dab it on paper. If only they were not dried out. I just needed a little water. I yearned for water. This was not a spiritual thing. It was visceral. I felt it like thirst. My brushes, my colours. Let me paint! I could hardly restrain my arm from reaching out.

R
ebecca felt the air move in the little room where they all knelt. She felt the presence.

Something happened here. With these brushes, these paints. It was long ago, but these things had been saved for a reason. They were clues to be followed. The lilies, the caked colours in their little pots, the ready brush ends in the air. How preserved they were and how perfect, wrapped in their tissues, set aside, year after decade after century, waiting. But for what?

“I feel as if she could pick up a brush and write a message,” said Rebecca.

W
hy did I feel so uneasy? I looked at the photo of Iwajiro. It was taken after the end of his lessons with me. He had been a sensitive boy; he became a sallow, truculent man. I had been fond of him. He had come upon me mixing paints in the little gutter of water outside our house, and he had asked if he could watch. Only that. At first he wanted nothing else. He watched me paint, and soon he began to do little errands for me. Sometimes he played with Tachi. But more than she did, he wanted to paint. I became his teacher, and he was a faithful student without serious talent.

But he grew older. His life of artistic involvement was threatened when his brother became ill. We wrote letters about that. His heart was breaking. Then, a little while after Hokusai died, his brother died. He went into the business. He was resentful. At first he pushed me for information, for patterns. And then he wrote me no more. He kept in touch with Katsushika Isai, my father’s disciple who travelled to Obuse, and with Tsuyuki Kosho. But not with me.

I looked at the roll of papers, crispy but otherwise just as they had been
150
years ago. I suddenly had a memory. He was a man by then, maybe twenty-five years old. I found him working on the little desk in Isai’s print shop in Yokohama. Iwajiro was practising a signature.

“Iwajiro,” I said, “what is that you are working on?”

He slid one paper under another. He flushed.

“I am curious about the calligraphy,” he said.

“Show me that!”

“No, Sensei,” he said.

He had never before disrespected me. I raised my eyebrows. Lucky me, I was not married, so I had eyebrows to raise.

“I am ashamed,” he murmured. He bowed his face to the floor and did not move until I turned away. Then someone interrupted us, and Iwajiro bowed himself out the door, his papers in his hand. I forgot about it.

Katsushika Isai came to Obuse while Hokusai and I were living in that little house. He later had some dealings with Koyama the merchant. I remember a strange enterprise between the two of them, Iwajiro and Isai. I had never understood it; it had to do with business. Long after Hokusai’s death, Isai would travel to Obuse to meet Iwajiro.

This was something I had not thought of for a long time.

Why did I feel so restless? The others sat talking and looking at the lilies. The papers remained tightly rolled. I paced behind, corner to corner. Little pictures nagged at the back of my mind: Isai, my friend, inviting me to come and work at his shop; Iwajiro waving to me and my father as we set out for the long road back to Edo, a twisted smile on his face; my father on his deathbed, giving me his seal—“Never let it out of your sight,” he said.

The others were talking. Given that there are only five works in existence proven to be by Oei—the others in museums in Boston, Tokyo, Los Angeles, and Cleveland—this painting was a very important discovery, someone said. I had signed it. Clearly. Unlike Chrysanthemums, where the “Hokusai” signature had perhaps been tampered with. The men talked amongst themselves about this tampering with signatures. Apparently a work of mine in the Tokyo National Museum, Woman Fulling Cloth, shows evidence that someone tried to erase my signature.

A bitter taste filled my rattly throat. Even amongst the roguish artists, to alter a signature was the foulest of deeds. Dog Hokusai had done it during Hokusai’s lifetime.

Rebecca took this personally. She cried out: “Why would they do that? What did they have against her?”

“Nothing,” the others said. “They just wanted to pass it off as Hokusai’s.”

A
t such a moment, what did those modern people do but go into a small fit of picture taking. Kubota took a photo of Rebecca, Hart, and our host kneeling in front of the screen. Rebecca took a picture of my painting and signature. Then she took all the Japanese together—Koyama-san impassive, having decided to make this private thing public; Kubota, with his thatch of thick black hair, more boyish, squinting; Hart, sharp-eyed and primed and completely on the scent. Then she took a picture of the room, because she said you could feel the past there, as bold as the sunlight.

50

Lost and Found

IN THE CLEAN, SIMPLE, TINY VENT VERT HOTEL
, Rebecca breakfasted with Oei. They had perfect French coffee and miniature croissants. Oei picked up the horn-shaped golden pastry in two hands and then put it down. She pulled a tiny bit off one end and put it gently inside her lips. Rebecca laughed, glad to see her. She said, “We need to talk.”

The little indigo-clad artist—now adorned with the dot in the middle of her forehead—was not talking. She had discovered the butter and the butter knife and the strawberry jam. She had consumed two croissants and was asking for more; another coffee for each of them was being borne their way even then. She looked content and at home. And why not? If she was going to be anywhere, Obuse was the place. Not much changed in the last couple of centuries, except for the museum devoted to her father. A close community. No one bothered about her, not the British tourists poring over their roadmap, the desk clerk, or the waitress.

This unveiling of the paint pots and brushes and the lilies nagged at Rebecca. Was it a little staged? Could there really be a genuine painting by Oei in a country storeroom? These weren’t mentioned in Kubota’s written accounts, but that might be for security.

The gentleman seemed very sincere. Kubota-san trusted him; he was on the board of the museum and the head of the long-established local family that had once transported Oei to Obuse to help her father.

The lilies had the seal of Hokusai. Did that make sense if it was just a teacher’s exercise? And the story about the papers being in storage for
150
years? It sounded oddly familiar.

Had there been another reference to this, beyond what Kubota-san had written? She’d come across it, she was sure. She tried to picture all those papers on her desk. In all those notes she took from the conference proceedings, a mention of Koyama. Another researcher had made the trip to Obuse.

She gestured to the waitress: Was it okay if she moved to another table so she could open her laptop where there were no crumbs? Yes, of course. Rebecca unzipped her computer. The essay she remembered now; her notes would be on the laptop somewhere. She looked down the list of research files. They were not well organized. Crime in Edo, sex in Edo, funerals in Edo. Here: the proceedings of a conference on Hokusai in Venice in
1990
. A volume edited by Gian Carlo Calza assisted by John Carpenter.