The Ghost Brush (51 page)

40

Black Ships

AND THAT IS HOW I CAME
to be present on that night.

I had walked out of Sakujiro’s garden and then beyond. I climbed the hill. I stood overlooking the sea. The wind was at my back, blowing away from the land. It tore my hair out of its knot, throwing it over my face. A feeling of freedom came to me, from such a simple thing. The town was below me, homes lit by small lanterns. It was July 8, 1853, by the Western calendar. Night had fallen. White rows of foam turned themselves over on the beach, but farther out, hard crests like little mountain ranges of water hared off. The water was moving away from us. Beyond the visible crest, the ocean became one with the misty grey sky. There was no horizon.

Promising Yasayuke and the apprentices that I would return, I had closed the doors of the North Star Studio. I was a defenceless old woman being sent to live with relatives in Uraga. For Hokusai this place had been a safe hideaway from the searching eyes of the bakufu, a simple fishing village. We had played in the waves here.

But this had been only the surface. Now Uraga was the tip of our outstretched fingers. Since Western ships had appeared in the bay, Western-leaning samurai had made it a meeting place. Perhaps they always had. Conspiracies were hatched here. The bakufu were wary: cannons were mounted on these very hills, the hills of Miura, above the town.

How much of this had the Old Man known? Had he met Kozan here? Why did he keep this from me? To protect me? Or just to protect his secrets, which were numerous.

The moon came through a cloud and I saw something coming in on the waves. What was it?

More moon, and I saw it was a man struggling with an oar. He was light; his skin shone in the moonlight. I could see no boat or waves. Then the moonlight was gone and he was too.

The moon came out again. I saw him, farther in. I saw that he was the first, a small pilot boat. Something much larger was coming behind.

It was a black ship. The white foam tossed and obscured it. The background swallowed it. But that’s what it was: a dark, edgeless boat. It looked like a visitor from the spirit world.

Gradually, the mist cleared; the moonlight came through. I saw another and then another black ship. They were sailing against the wind. And they were breathing white smoke. They came dancing into Edo Bay from the open sea.

Oh, I was dumbstruck to see that magic: the ships moving forward when the wind pushed them back.

The foreign ships had arrived.

The Old Man would have said my witchery brought me here, for this moment. And he would have been laughing if he were here. He would have been running and jumping if he could. I stood still, awestruck. It was happening. Hokusai had missed this moment, and by only four years. “And frequent visits to Japan of foreign ships.” In Obuse he had written this line as the ending of his death poem. Later, in Edo, when he was near to death, he had taken it out. Hedging his bets, as always.

“
Hey, hey, Old Man,” I shouted so he could hear me from hell. “How about it?”

I was so lonely, suddenly, standing there. I missed my father, and I missed Eisen, and I even—reaching back, into the moments when the idea of the West had first entered me—missed von Siebold. He had foreseen this too: we had spoken of it. It was inevitable as death, as life. My old life and its people were becoming relics. A new world was advancing on us. I was here, and alive, against many odds. Why had I, almost alone amongst those I loved, been chosen to survive to see it? I wanted to shout to Shino, but she was far away from here. Tucked up in her old temple above Kyoto, she was, I hoped, safe from the strife that took us all.

Standing on the Miura hill, with the inevitable presence of the enemy, the conqueror, the liberator beneath me, I imagined the Dutch doctor tracing these inlets and bays that led into the heart of Japan. Some people said that the foreigners were using the maps von Siebold had obtained by treachery to find their way to our ports. Was it true? I could still see his hands, strong and long, with flat-ended fingers, wily and intelligent. I could still see his beautiful wide brow and his long thin lips that seemed to be smiling on me from far away, reassuring me.

Now I alone was present as the black ships came. I felt the wind and threw back my hair, which was blinding me. I knew by their huge white breath, by their pushing forward in the night against the wind, against nature itself, that the ships were not to be stopped. The Shogun’s efforts would be for nothing. The foreigners were coming, and they would break open this little world.

I wailed into the wind, truly a witch. Longing and fear filled me. Longing to be let loose, and fear of the red-headed barbarians, of soldiers with guns, of samurai at war. Fear of the red-headed barbarians and longing to see someone I had loved. My men! They had all deserted me. Why me? Why had I alone lived to see this?

If these ships could sail upwind, then anything could happen. Perhaps I could see those lost men again—von Siebold, my father.

The black ships, three of them, were there, and then the mist rose and the moon was hidden and they were gone into darkness. There was nothing but a blank page of grey and black from sand to sky.

The wind dropped suddenly.

I could hear voices, horns, the bellows of animals. On my hilltop I paced in their invisible presence. I spoke urgently to my father: “Old Man, Old trickster! Exile in sleepy Uraga? I doubt it. No. You knew this was coming. You and those samurai, plotting. You were looking over the waves. You always yearned for the Western world. You wanted to be famous there too. Now look: the barbarians are coming! You hoaxed me, you hoaxster.”

I saw in my mind the secret staircase from Takai Kozan’s studio in Obuse. His retainers scanning the roads. I remembered sitting in the company of Shozan Sakuma and looking at the book with drawings of how to make the new thing called a camera. Sakuma was now sentenced to house arrest for nine years for preaching treason. Kozan would be happy. He and my father. Why did they choose a phoenix to be painted on the ceiling? Did it conceal a message? Japan was burning and would be destroyed, but it would be reborn, like the phoenix. Uraga was the place where this fire had been sputtering for years. Now it was about to burst into flames.

And my brother had urged me to return to Uraga for safety!

It was a wonderful, terrifying joke.

B
uddha teaches that there are phases of everything imaginable. All that appears to be solid is in flux and might even be imaginary. Waves are driven by some energy from the deep, and also by wind. They become foam and fog.

Then something more solid moved. The ship was alongside the hills! The pitch of the waves rocked it. It was like a clumsy brush, like the reed broom that Hokusai had used to make that giant Buddha, writing history.

At the narrowest part of the channel now there were gun batteries on the hills on both sides. The Shogun had ordered that any Western ships reaching the narrows be fired on. But no guns fired. The black ships moved invincibly, up the wind in the middle of the channel, out of range of either side. One, two, three. There were rocks in that narrow passage, visible when the air was clear but hidden in the fog on a night like this. These ships did not come up on the rocks. They continued, right into the heart of the bay.

They were demon ships.

Beneath the hills there was nothing but silence and darkness. I was truly, thoroughly, frightened. They had entered. I remembered my father telling me the world was round; it was a fishbowl. He had walked all over its outside, looking across the surface. I felt that night that I was on the inside, swirling in the water, knocking against the glass. Drowning in it. I went home to my brother’s house. I stood over Tachi with tender fears for her. I lay in bed and stared at the night. These foreigners had such powers. What would they do to us?

A
t first, nothing.

By dawn the guns had been moved nearer. The bakufu had commandeered a hundred of the small fishing boats and put a cannon in the front of each, to be sent out to fire on the ships. But this was futile.

We gathered on the cliffs to watch. After the guns, the first things out were artists in little boats, sketching. But I returned to my vantage point under a tree on top of the hill. Here is what I drew: A great, heavy-bodied black ship with its three masts and many strips of netting. Its sails furled horizontally along poles. The flags tearing out the back as the mysterious power moved the ships against the wind. An unfurling banner of black smoke above, the breath of the dragon. A box in the centre of the ship sitting low in the water, with wheels that turned like the waterwheels. A man, a tiny figure dwarfed by the striped flag above his head.

41

Household Chores

TACHI AND I SAT IN THE GARDEN
. The family of my brother lived in comfort. There was a small pond with carp; there were trees that fringed the edges, and black rocks that shone when it rained. From a certain corner you could just catch a glimpse of the sea. I told her the ghost story of the Tokaido. I had seen it on the kabuki stage.

“The beautiful young woman Oiwa lived by the water’s edge, where the marshes run alongside the Tokaido Road. She had an evil suitor. Her father refused to give her in marriage to the man, who was called Iemon. So Iemon murdered him. But it seemed the refusal was too late in any case. Oiwa and Iemon were already living together, and she was already pregnant by him. She bore the child, but then the villain Iemon turned against her, saying she was ugly.”

“Why would he call her ugly? She was beautiful,” protested Tachi.

“The reason for Iemon’s treachery was that he had visited a nearby lord and caught sight of his granddaughter. The lord allowed the two to meet, and then he allowed Iemon to marry his granddaughter. Oiwa, who had borne his child, was only a poor woman, and she was not truly married. The lord was evil as well, and he thought that she and her child were of no account. To erase all trace of the lovely Oiwa, the lord sent her poison disguised as a healing potion for after childbirth. She drank it and became a hideous ogress.”

I pulled faces, stretching my mouth and ears and puckering my chin. We laughed until we could not speak, but Tachi was caught up with the injustice of it all, so I had to catch my breath and continue.

“Iemon then killed both Oiwa, the mother of his child, and her servant, and he tied their bodies on either side of a plank and pushed it into the river. The plank floated sometimes with one body up and sometimes with the other. Old women gathered at the river’s edge and saw this.”

I remembered this as one of the most terrifying scenes. Tachi was twitching with horror and delight as I told it. I created the scene: bodies merging and submerging in the water, dead hair and dead limbs floating, turning blue.

“The two murdered people became ghosts and haunted the lord and Iemon. In his sleep Iemon saw the hideous ogress who was once his beautiful young lover, and attempting to slay her, he murdered his new wife by accident. Oiwa, who was born in the Year of the Rat, then made her ghostly presence known in the form of rats. As the play ends, Iemon is swarmed and will be eaten by rats.”

I gave a large, satisfied sigh at the end of this: the evildoer had been punished, and in such a fitting way.

“That’s good,” said Tachi in a high but firm voice. I could see her imagining the hideous death and deciding that it was right. “But—the new wife—why did she have to die? Was she evil too?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “It seems she was punished for the evil of her father. Let’s ask . . .”

Then we both looked into the night sky. It was where my father and I had looked for answers when I was her age, and I told Tachi that. She looked solemn, and we quested in silence. She was an excellent partner in such activities. Tachi and I would go into the pine woods after rain to find the special pine mushrooms. When we brought them home, Tachi cooked them for me. I ate them because they granted immortality.

“If I am to live to be very, very old,” I told her, “I want you here too. You must eat these too.”

S
akujiro’s wife interrupted: Katsushika Isai had come to visit.

“This is suspicious,” said the other women of the household. “Why would he want to see this old woman? What is his game?”

Their narrowed eyes followed Isai and me as we found the low stone table in the garden. Tachi followed us and sat quietly nearby. Her back was turned, but I knew her ears were alert.

Isai was a tall, hawk-featured man who stepped as if he were walking on lily pads and whose narrow mouth worked nervously in pouchy cheeks. He glanced in amusement at my sister-in-law and her mother, whose shadows were clearly visible moving behind the screens.

“How is it for you here?” he said.

“I am asked to clean the kitchen,” I said. “To cook the rice.” I made a loud guffaw for the benefit of the women, whose shadows scattered, and he smiled thinly.

“Not your field of expertise. Now if they wanted you to go to the market, that might be better.”

“They save that task for themselves. They don’t like to let me out.”

Isai had opened a printshop in Yokohama. It was where the foreigners were contained by the Shogun. I had been in that town. There were two streets of ramshackle buildings, a few storehouses called by the foreign name of “godowns,” and some lodging houses on swampland. The whole town smelled like the sewage that collected nearby.