The Ghost Brush (29 page)

I wondered for the first time how my sister O-Miyo had managed this. I had never asked her and now she was dead. These men were beneath me: I couldn’t bother to lie.

“I’m going to the divorce temple.”

The men laughed. “Why?”

“My husband doesn’t like my cooking.”

They laughed some more. They grabbed me by the arm. “We should give you cooking lessons. That will keep you till he comes along.”

“You will be disappointed. He enjoys my cooking so little that he isn’t even chasing me,” I said. “I don’t sew either.”

This time I laughed along with them. Mune slid her window open and coughed. We all went quiet. “Miss Oei amuses you. But she is a distinguished artist,” she said. “She is my teacher, and I am taking her to a temple where she will paint pictures for the altar.” She waved a letter. “Here is the commission.”

The chief guard leaned out of his little wooden tower and waved us on. We hurried so we would be out of sight before they put their heads together.

About an hour down the road Mune gave me her heavy black headscarf and squeezed my shoulders. “I can’t go any farther. But you will sleep in the inn at Totsuka.” Then she and her bearers turned back and before long were invisible.

I began to walk again. The snow was a gift from the gods. It smoothed the path before me and filled my footsteps behind. I had not been out of the city since I was a child. It was not a day for tourism, that was true. But it was beautiful. I could see nothing of the land—or the water—on either side of the path. There was no colour in the world, only me with my black wrapper, like an unreadable character, an ink blot. I was going to an unknown existence.

Because of the snow a carter took pity and gave me a ride to Kawasaki. I repaid him with a sketch of his mule. I looked at the sea—white-whiskered, and getting more so. People passed me bent under umbrellas that were themselves bent under a fat cushion of snow. I walked on. My feet grew cold. I went to a teashop and warmed them. No one pursued me. No one wanted me back. No one knew where I had gone.

I dawdled, an ox between masters. A woman on her own. Thinking ahead to all the years of my life and savouring, in advance, the pleasure of being myself. I would go to the temple and make sure the bonds of the marriage were officially undone. I would bow that far to custom and law. After that, I would be free.

Kawasaki, in summer, was covered in barley fields waving to the sea. Now it was dry brown sticks poking through the blanket of a vast snow plain. I could not get as far as the inn at Totsuka in such weather. I begged a bed at a temple. The next day I took the ferry over the Rokugo River. I rode with a carter from Kawasaki down to Totsuka and alighted smelling of fish, the snow still falling blankly and without haste from a sullen sky.

Here was the inn Mune spoke of, just at the side of the Tokaido in Totsuka. A friend to the ukiyo-e artists owned it. Bunzo had bought scroll paintings from my father. If I introduced myself, he would take me in. But would he tell his other guests? Would they laugh at me? I did not want to break the spell.

It was easy to be unrecognized. It wasn’t as if people stared and wondered. They just didn’t see me. I sat hunched in a dark corner until the latest hour. I watched Bunzo amongst the guests. He was a good man and would be kind to poor women who showed up in storms. I let him assume that I was one of the usual fugitives. There was no danger of his remembering my face. Without my father, I was nobody. Luckily I had a little money, and I bought a place for the night beside the stove.

In the morning they gave me tea and a lunch of dried fish and rice. The innkeeper stood wordless in the doorway with his hand outstretched: a path led up to Kamakura. I took it, leaving the Tokaido behind.

The snow had stopped. The sky was blue. The path was steep but wide, trodden for centuries by courtiers, desperate women, and furious men. In places the snow was caught in the high pine canopy, leaving the ground bare. But in other places it was deep. I made the first footsteps, and these footprints remained behind me. I passed courtiers on the way down. They gestured onward: “Not too much farther! That was the steepest bit!” One gave me hot tea.

It was dark and the snow had begun again when I came to a small temple to the Fox God. There was a candle burning there. I stepped inside and rubbed my hands over the flame. I breathed into the cup of my palms and drew that breath back inside me: warmth. I stepped back onto the path and looked up. Finally I saw, just off the path, a set of steps leading up into the hill.

I climbed into the tops of the trees. There were lanterns. There was a temple roof. For the first time I hesitated. I had come all this way. Was I doing the right thing? I was discarding a man’s protection in a world for men only. Was it foolish?

Yes.

But was I prepared to cook?

No.

Here was the gate. No one chased me. I did not have to throw my shoes ahead to assure my safety. I walked slowly and thoughtfully under its welcome roof and stood in the courtyard in silence. I could hear the nuns singing. I went towards the voices.

I
don’t remember how they welcomed me that night. How did I ever get warm? The marrow of my bones had frozen solid. I was wet up past my knees.

“Is anyone pursuing you?” the nuns wanted to know. They waved their incense over me.

“No,” I said.

“It is a tribute to your great strength to arrive in such weather.”

I
STAYED FOR THREE MONTHS
. I described my innocent husband to the Suigetsu kannon, a tiny female figure who stood beside the pool and gazed at the full moon in the water. “He is not angry. He is not violent. He does not drink to excess, and I have not been beaten.”

The water shimmered; the kannon maintained her curious fraction of a smile. “What on earth do you find fault with, then?” she seemed to say.

“He does not see me. He wants me to cook and sew,” I said. “He wants me to be other than what I am.”

My grievances sounded petty even to my own ears. Other fugitives had bruises and scaldings; they screamed in their dreams.

“What woman expects to be seen for herself?”

I did.

“Does he berate you for being barren?”

“No, he does not. Yes, I am barren. I am glad to be barren. I need every hour of my day to paint.” I found that I did have complaints about him. “He resents my work. He resents my old father. He fears me, and fear makes him cruel.”

These merciful nuns heard and did not criticize me. They understood study and prayer, and they understood the need for silence. They alone allowed that art made its demands on my person. They had their methods to secure the divorce I wanted. They set about it. There was no contest. The husband had to file a letter of just three and a half lines. Tomei’s epistle, written on thick mulberry paper in careful brushwork, arrived to join the hundreds of other letters kept in the treasure house.

“She is not a proper wife. I do not want her and release her. She is free to go where she likes and to marry whomever she pleases. She is useless to me.”

I read it by the pool. The kannon winked. She had saved me. But I was to be called “useless.” That was the price. I folded the paper and tucked it in my sleeve.

Spring came. The grounds were covered in moss; the old stones greened with it, the grasses luminous in their newness. I walked in the graveyard, where there were statues of famous nuns of the past. I wandered the gardens and painted the flowers—narcissus, hydrangea. I walked out to the harbour. It was April, the season for fishing bonito.

The bonito came on the Black Tide. The fishermen were out in their boats with their nets. I watched the waves; I walked beside them. I thought of my father and how he must need me. From the beach I could see Mt. Fuji, resplendent in its cape of dazzling snow.

Part 3

23

Von Siebold at Nagasaki, 1823

ON THE FAN-SHAPED ISLAND
in Nagasaki Bay, the Dutch doctor sat at his piano. His fingers ran up and down the keys.

The fingers were strong and long, easily reaching an octave and a half. At the end of a run he rapped each yellowed ivory hard, twice: this was meant to be a workout. A surgeon needed strong hands.

The music rattled in the stillness. The Japanese guards who knelt at the doors gritted their teeth.

The doctor was a prisoner. His back door was the Water Gate and opened onto waves. That was where the ships docked. His front door was the City Gate and led to the town of Nagasaki. He was not allowed to go out there. And few people from the town were allowed in through the gate. On the high wall beside it was a sign that said, in Japanese and Dutch, “No Priests. No Beggars. No Women.” Smaller brush strokes added: “With the Exception of Prostitutes Bearing a Red Stamp in Their Papers.”

Phillip Franz von Siebold was twenty-seven. He was tall and blond, a strikingly beautiful man, although so strange did he appear to the Japanese that they imagined him to be a demon. The upper half of his face was generous: he had wide eyes and eyebrows that sprouted above deep sockets; his forehead was flat, and his look was ready. Below the eyes his face was quite different: it became narrow and sensitive. His nose ran like a plumb line down his face, long and thin; his lips, also long and thin, crossed it but, happily, turned up at the corners. He had been smiling since he arrived. But the smile was wearing. He was impatient. The world outside the City Gate was rich beyond knowing.

He wore a uniform with epaulettes. The gold tassels on his shoulders shook. Up and down the ivories he went, fingers leaping, chin bobbing. He and the other traders of the Dutch East India Company lived on this manmade island called Deshima, at the very edge of the closed country of Japan. Von Siebold’s job was to provide medical care to his countrymen. There weren’t many of them left: trade had dwindled and did not justify the posting. Only curiosity did, and a collector’s avid desire for artifacts. The Dutch wanted information about the Japanese; they wanted objects, pictures and growing things, trees and flowers. Phillip von Siebold was the perfect man to collect these.

If only he could escape his little island prison.

He had landed a month ago. When his mind returned to the wild sea journey, he planted his feet wide on the floor under his piano stool, as if the stool might buck him off, as if he had to ride it like a horse. Sailing from Batavia in late spring, the ship Drie Gezusters had been caught in a typhoon as it approached the southern tip of the Japanese islands. Von Siebold was lurching along the deck thinking he might die. When he saw a fishing boat foundering in the waves, with no sails or oars, he shouted: “They’re going down! Can we hook them?”

“We might go down ourselves!”

“Try!”

The Dutch sailors pulled five Japanese from the water. The fishermen knelt on the deck and prayed as their boat was bashed to planks. Then they did a curious thing: they made a circle and shaved their beards and heads. They seemed to be in despair. They gestured: we wished to die in the water.

“You’re saved,” said the Dutch. “We saved you!” And they clapped their giant hands on the fishermen’s dripping backs.

But the fishermen trembled and prayed.

A week later the Drie Gezusters sailed into Nagasaki Bay, to be greeted by a row of fanatical sword-bearing men as wide as they were tall. Guards took the Dutchmen’s guns, and the rescued local sailors were marched away to whatever fate. Why? It was a crime to be rescued by foreigners.

The rulers of this shut-away place were perverse, thought the doctor.

While he was being searched for forbidden articles, von Siebold had looked around. The land, unlike the people, was gentle. Sheltering hills scattered with white houses surrounded the deep blue bay. The manmade traders’ island sat like a plug in the basin of the harbour. His Bible he sacrificed ostentatiously to the Bible barrel, but he kept a smaller version tucked down below his belt at the small of his back, its title page ripped out. He didn’t know why. He never sang a hymn or made the sign of the cross. The Japanese abhorred Christians. He had been prepared to stamp on his holy book, an act sometimes required of his predecessors. It would have cost him nothing. But they didn’t ask him to.

Still, at the end of it all, they had nearly refused him entrance. The guards spoke better Dutch than he did; he was born and had studied in Germany and spoke with an accent. This made them suspicious that he was a German spy. He told them that he was a yama-orandajin, a Mountain Dutchman.

He got a fresh chuckle out of this witticism as he banged down an octave lower on the piano. All that fierce display to stop spies and Christians, yet they had welcomed him. He had got this far. In fact he was a spy, in a benevolent way, eager to endure his imprisonment on artificial earth and to submit to Japanese rules, if doing so would allow him access to their secrets. He had brought with him an electrostatic generator, an air pump, and a galvanizing apparatus, to impress the Japanese and encourage them to share their own wonders. And he had brought this piano, which he played every day.

E
ven his countrymen—the Dutch who inhabited the strange island prison with its low houses, enclosed courtyards, warehouses, and animal pens, with its salty smell of sea and rusted metal doors awaiting the next ship (not expected for half a year)—existed out of time. They dressed in what had been the court fashion before von Siebold was born, quilted velvet coats and black cloaks. When they went out into Nagasaki, which they did only with permission and under guard, they wore hats with feathers and carried Spanish canes with gold handles. They loved to impress. They were tall and the Japanese short; they strode while the simple Japanese farmers and townsmen scuttled. The Japanese were thin and the Dutch were fat. When they returned from their town excursions, they were even fatter because of the parcels they hid in the folds of their cloaks.