The Ghost Brush (45 page)
The bombardment began, a chorus of clattering. I couldn’t imagine what was hitting us. It sounded like little wooden balls. They struck the metal pots outside the door; they struck the roof and made a different, more deadly sound. And now they struck the rocks, which began to chime. Were these bullets from the Western muskets?
I looked out and saw round white ice balls falling and leaping back up from the ground, demented. I began to moan. Hokusai pushed himself erect and rubbed his fists in his eyes, and began to chant his sutras loudly in time with the battering.
It was like a rain of arrows. I covered Hokusai’s old bald head with my arm; I was hiding, but I wanted to see. The noise was astonishing, high pings of metal, low pings of wood and straw and lead tile, hard cracks of rock being struck. My father cited punishment from the gods and thought they were trying to kill him.
“Th-thun-thun-der gods are c-c-coming for me!” he cried. A long time ago he was walking along the Tokaido and lightning hit him, throwing him into a rice paddy. I knew this story. For years he had boasted: heavenly fire had touched him once and left him shaken but alive, and now he was safe from it. “They cannot kill me,” he had said. He was Raijin the Thunder God.
But now the story changed.
“I was too proud! The Thunder Gods are coming to punish me!” He was frantic with fear, and he made Tachi cry. She hid under the desk while the storm went on and the Old Man gibbered on the futon.
In the face of this I had no option but to be practical. “It’s weather, Old Man,” I said. “Only weather. It came from the mountains,” I kept saying. “It will go back there.” But I too believed in omens. I was afraid that the politics of our host angered the gods.
A
t last the town was completely still. I looked through the paper windows, some of which were torn, and saw piles of the dangerous white shot everywhere. “Stay inside! Come away from the window!” Tachi cried.
More thunder rolled in. The lightning followed—forked, ragged shoots that crossed the open sky in one flash and were gone. The rain began after that. “This is too much!” We held each other under the onslaught.
Finally the storm passed. Hokusai fell asleep, but I stayed awake. Later the storm returned. This time there were no strings of white fire. After the rage and growl of thunder, the sky itself went an all-over daylight white, throwing all the trees and buildings and even their tile roofs into instant visibility, as if day had flashed on and then gone out. The whole sky was white now, and then black, and then white again. Shadows burst up and then dissolved.
I paced our little hut. I looked out the paper windows. I wished I could paint what I saw: the village frozen, the Kozan house, the houses of the elders, the simple farmers; every one was silent. Where had the people gone? How had this storm disconnected the threads of our living together so no one even looked out?
I waited for the flashes that made shadows appear and gave trees and houses a dark presence in precise outline. Each time, I tried to remember how it had looked before the light went out. The storm went on all night, and rain fell, melting the hail. In the morning I was exhausted from lack of sleep, and so were all the people in the town.
In the morning my father was unable to get out of bed.
I knew it was time. We would have to go back to Edo.
Exorcisms
WHEN JUHACHI-YA DEPOSITED US
in Edo I put my father into our tenement. If he did not lie down or stay propped against a wall, he fell down. The
yoi-yoi
palsy or the touch of the Thunder God, something was getting him in small, stealthy attacks.
We went back to the daily exorcisms. He would concentrate fiercely, make a lion image in only sixty seconds, then struggle to his feet and go straight out into the alley. He crumpled the page and threw it down on the ground. Sometimes his hand was so shaky that the brush picture was illegible.
People would walk by and pick up these pieces of paper, uncrumple them, and knowing the great master lived within, hurry away gloating over their prize. After seeing this, I began myself to slip outside when Hokusai’s eyes were closed, pick up the balls of paper, smooth them, and hide them.
N
OW BEGAN THE MOST DIFFICULT TIME
. We moved three times in that next-to-the-last year, from Honjo across the Sumida back to Asakusa, first to Tamachi, then to Umamichi, and finally to a tenement on the grounds of the Henjoin temple. There we remained, finished with running. We had accepted our fate. We were strangely calm.
The kabuki theatres near Nihonbashi had burned, and they were moved to the Asakusa temple, right near us. We were on the margin of respectability, surrounded by entertainment and by water—canals, the river, and marshes.
In the city it was said that Hokusai was able to work without glasses and walk long distances every day with back unbent. But that was a dream. In darker moments we faced the truth. He could not leave home again. We declined an invitation to return to Obuse. He lay or knelt in our tenement, and I sat beside him. I was nearly fifty years old. “Lucky me, I still have a father to make me feel young,” I joked, although in truth he was killing me.
I saved my thoughts for Eisen, again my friend. He had given up print-making with Hiroshige and now wrote novels. The occupation suited him. As he grew older he took younger and younger women as his bedmates. I saw him walking with one of them. He shooed her: “Go! Be gone! Here is a real woman I want to see!”
We gave each other small, broken hugs and parted again—the prostitute, I could see, darting out to join him from some shopfront where she had waited. It didn’t matter. I had the sense that I had disappointed Eisen by not becoming famous enough. Perhaps I had disappointed Sanba too, wherever he was: “You have an important life to lead!” he had said.
Was this my important life? Or was there another that had eluded me? My days had all come down to this: ghost brush, muse, and nursemaid to the great man. As he faded, my love grew stronger. If I ever wondered what it was for, this endless labour, this ill-paid work, I had only to look at his beloved face and know I would do anything to disguise the helplessness there. My work did not matter. To quote Sadanobu, “There have been books since times long past and no more are necessary!”
I saw it now. Making pictures resulted in nothing more than making pictures. There was no reward. If we were lucky the earnings helped us survive as long as the work demanded. There was no virtue in it. Only a few knew my work, but they respected me. A soft life, fame? Grand ambitions had never been mine. They had been my father’s, but he was wiser now, and thought only of improving his art.
But then work, strangely, came my way.
I illustrated a tea dictionary that was much admired. Then came the Illustrated Manual for Women.
I
was happy with my new commission. I made elaborate small figures in the intense colours that were my trademark. I put my heart into it. It was better, more concentrated, more original than it needed to be.
For the opening spread I created a crowd, an array of dark-clad women. One was a courtesan with fourteen hairpins and a hemline recognizable as the Hokusai/Oei look of controlled frenzy, kicked up on the side so she could do her figure-eight step. One was a nun with a black hood over her hair. One had a toothpick held coquettishly to her mouth and two black dots on her forehead. Another was a woman from the countryside in plain cotton; another wore a kerchief, while one had very long, black straight hair tied in one bunch, coming together below her waist.
I showed all the tasks and ways of women in my town. Bridal processions, the debut of a courtesan. (“What’s the difference?” Eisen laughed.) Table settings. (How would I know?) The right way to apply makeup.
Outside, autumn deepened. In rare moments a shaft of sun would strike the earth, exposing the rubble of our lives. The treetops were frail crowns of black against the sky, but their lower halves held on to browning leaves. They seemed to be captive, while their leaves skipped away, free at last.
I got up early, went out to get tea, and came back. I worked until twilight, then dried my brush and saw my father off to sleep. Small white flakes whirled in the air, landing on my cheek and turning to water. I worked quietly beside Hokusai’s mattress on the Illustrated Manual for Women.
Disciples dropped in. Katsushika Isai had taken over our work in Obuse, having travelled there with Juhachi-ya. That made me jealous. The young man Tsuyuki Kosho had also been to Obuse and had dealings with Koyama the rice merchant. Isai said that my father had given him his seal of Hyaku, one hundred years. It made me uneasy. I did not believe this was so.
I drew a rectangular tray. I put nine round bowls on it, in three rows of three. I made another rectangular tray: six round bowls on that one, in one row of three, with one on its own, and a row of two. Perhaps these represented different meals. I drew a large bowl with a fish lying on it, the head and tail drooping off the edge, and a tray with a hen, small thing, beak off one side and tail feathers off the other.
This was the way not to do it: clumsy housekeeping, a classic sketch that should have the X drawn through it.
Here was a woman serving from a bowl of noodles. Would she eat those noodles herself? No. She was holding them high over the bowl with her chopsticks up around her eyes, the bowl at her chest, a baby on her lap. The people sat at small, individual black tables with a tray top on which were plates of fish and bowls of rice waiting to be served.
The seal of Hyaku had been for the future. The future was in my hands. I would speak to my father about it. But my father was difficult to make sense of these days.
I made pictures of shells and spiny creatures, a picture of a schoolroom—children working on figures on the floor, learning to write the characters. A large standing abacus to one side. And in front, with his back turned, a sleeping bald man—ah, the teacher!
I drew the steps in making sakura cookies: four women picking cherry blossoms off a branch and saving them on a cloth. Another leaning with both hands on a big rolling pin that has a lump of dough wrapped around it. It was a beautiful scene, more beautiful than such a handbook deserved.
In small frames, usually at the top of the page, I made icons for trees, mountains, ferns, scrolls. Lanterns, butterflies, hills, holly, birds in flight, a flute, wooden clappers, a kitten with a ball of wool, pine needles. Grasses, tree trunks, a thatched pavilion.
Along the frame I drew crowds in little shops, bolts of fabric piled one on top of another, men displaying the fabrics, women choosing. Diagrams: how to fold paper, the latest way to tie the obi. I had never had the slightest interest in these feminine accomplishments. But I was good at “small,” and they were fun to draw.
I drew a temple. I put candlesticks on tall stands and, along the roof beams, bits of folded paper, hanging. Women with long hair, a thick wall of it hanging past their knees, tied only once, at the waist, in the nobles’ style. Another sunk into a deep bow with her fan to her face. The deities were at the top of the frame, floating in clouds.
I drew the game of incense identification. A woman poured a bit of scent on each of several handkerchiefs. She came before her lover, who was relaxing on his futon, knelt with the handkerchiefs and wafted them past his face. She let her sleeve fall open so part of the fragrance he caught was her own. Lily or rose petals or pine boughs in the snow or almond blossom.
I thought of other scents: behind the brothels in the Hour of the Snake; in mid-morning the stench of vomit and night waste; the remains of a feast fought over by dogs.
Or the smell of age, the smell of my father wasting on his cot. The smell of his clothing, the smell of our room, of cat piss and confinement, of stale food wrappers.
G
usts of wind knocked the dry leaves off their perches and sent them protesting against the thin wooden walls and screens. I felt closed and heavy and motionless, like a stone in the bottom of a river.
Yet I found a kind of peace illustrating that manual. Nostalgia filled me and rose like a net billowing overhead. Women’s lives: wonderful and terrible. And mostly strange to me. Yes, at one time I had a husband. I remembered the dull workings of his brush. “You’re beautiful,” he had said to me once. “You could just relax for a while and be beautiful.”
My father thought me ugly. But I wondered why I had taken his opinion and not the opinion of my husband, who may have been a fool but loved me.
Other women had children: I was barren. Unlike Shino, who had earned her barrenness in the Yoshiwara, I came to this state naturally. The gods had seen to that, and I was grateful.
I drew the life cycle of an egg. First a sphere with two circles within, then an egg shape, then that egg shape with separations as head and two legs began to sever their shapes from the egg. Then there were five: head, arm, arm, leg, leg. A curious leaf-shaped or star-shaped figure. Then this figure stretched out more, head, arm arm, leg leg, and trunk. On the next page I would at last show that it was a boy with a full head of black hair, standing on two legs.
Babies became children. Those could be nice. Or not. I had painted them for the Dutch doctor. I had Tachi; she came to me. Mothers, sisters, another joy of women. I had no one left. Even Shino was gone. I drew a mendicant nun with her bowl.