The Ghost Brush (89 page)

Our destination was the marsh at Tokyo Bay, near the mouth of the Sumida River. Ienari had become Shogun at eighteen; he was over forty now. Sadanobu’s reforms had affected him perversely: he was dissolute, quixotic, and indulgent. He had built a brothel inside the castle, lattice and all. All of Edo knew he often cancelled his afternoon appointments to take a falconry day in the marsh.

The tide flooded in and out through a narrow water gate. A huge pine tree grew at one edge. It was famous because it was
150
years old. Irises with fat purple flames were in bloom. Riding trails threaded around a little teahouse. A small mound representing Mt. Fuji was there for ladies to climb.

The Shogun’s retinue stood by, with mounted warriors and standing warriors as wide as they were tall. Ienari himself beckoned us on, smiling and lighthearted; he looked like a fat boy. We trudged over three bridges that zigzagged through the tall grasses. They stood in water a foot deep, the pillars supporting them iced with salt.

I felt the nearness of the sea. The tide was coming in. At the sandy edges of the water little crabs scuttled. The sun was hot, and as the water rose, the marshes began to glint, like metal. The birds couldn’t hide—not the ducks along the soft edges of the sandy earth that bordered the pond, or the small birds with yellow wings that were perched on the tall spires of sea grass, bending them.

The falcon sat on Shogun Ienari’s wrist with the sun flashing on its majestic little metal helmet. It was chained and clad in feathered leggings. The Shogun wore an elegant deerskin glove. Everyone stood as in a trance. In the silence you could hear the insects. Hokusai scratched his ass. Buncho, the official artist, stood straight and looked at home surrounded by lords. Sadanobu—paunchy, hard-nosed, softer, somehow womanish—stood nearby. He looked at Hokusai with a curl in his lip.

There was a murmur, an instruction somewhere in the ranks.

No one flinched.

The chicken made a ghastly screech, as if it were being killed.

Ienari alone laughed. My arm ached from holding the cage. I lowered it a little.

My father jerked his head at me: up, up. I raised it.

I had no idea what he was planning. But my irritation was great enough to make me forget my fear. My father played a dangerous game. These lords, and the Shogun himself, were impulsive and could have had us in prison for impudence. Did Hokusai play the game because of his pride in his samurai background or—remembering the “Hokusai, a peasant of Honjo” sign he put outside the door of each of our dwellings—his pride in being simple?

The chicken squawked again. I switched it to my other arm. Ienari gave the signal to free the dogs. They bounded off magnificently. Splashing and barking and tearing first in one direction, then in another, in zigzags, circles, they scared up the birds: herons, larks. Up from one clump flew a crane. A crane! Symbol of good luck.

Then Ienari lifted the hood off the falcon. He released the chain. The predator trembled on the regal wrist. We all held our breath at our sovereign’s brilliance, which was really the bird’s brilliance, the brilliant threat of nature. The artists stood waiting. My arm ached. My chicken scratched. I lifted one foot and then the other. The platform squeaked. The water moved beneath. The grasses swayed, and bird cries tested every fibre of the falcon’s being.

Then Ienari gave the sign. The predator shot forth like an arrow, pierced the heart of the crane, and brought it down. The dogs splashed towards the corpse. The falcon returned. Ienari stroked its neck lovingly.

Another crane flew up. Again the falcon went out to murder the bird of good luck, and again the dogs went mad for the blood.

There were larks, too, caught that day. There were others; I tired of it instantly. At last it was over. The Shogun’s party repaired to a restaurant, where the cook prepared the crane in the ritual way. We made our way up to Senso-ji temple, where the art competition would take place.

S
enso-ji was our home ground, which gave us an advantage in the competition.

Buncho went first. He made a brush sketch of the tidal garden we’d just left, the platform where Ienari had sat, the soft grasses of the marsh. His brush never varied in speed, never flipped or stabbed. He finished his sketch and remained still for a few seconds. Then he bowed extravagantly. The falcon deigned to turn its ears, keen enough to pick up the scratching of the brush while tucked inside its pretty helmet.

Minions lifted the paper and held it up so everyone could see. They sighed in appropriate awe.

Ienari paced back and forth. His step was heavy and rigid. His face showed a past of self-indulgence and certain gratification. The day would unroll as each one did: he would have his way, and there would be death and obedience and worship and pleasure. What did it matter? He had been too young; he had earned nothing. Even amongst Shoguns there is earning and not earning, there is worthy and worthless.

“You now,” he said, barking in Hokusai’s direction.

Hokusai’s large ears were turned upward. He appeared not to hear the ruler. He gave a soft whistle. The falcon glared and did not turn a feather. He was teasing the bird. He was trying to make it lose its concentration; by his very nonchalance, he was spreading insurrection.

Sadanobu cleared his throat regretfully. He seemed to say, I could have had you all wiped out, back when I was senior councillor, and I didn’t. I am too soft-hearted.

Ienari laughed at the stubborn little man as he stood in his poor robe with a roll of paper. “Come now, will you make us wait?”

“Oh,” said Hokusai agreeably, “is it my turn?”

I hung my head, waiting for the axe to fall. Failure to fear, a crime for which Sadanobu had often had people convicted, was written as if on a placard over my father’s head. But it was not failure. It was refusal.

Ienari laughed.

Hokusai fumbled for his brushes. He took the roll of paper. He stepped forward, his forehead wrinkled with pleasure. The retainers’ faces were grim. Ienari appeared to be charmed. Hokusai hummed a tune. I was wobbling under the weight of the stupid chicken cage. Its inhabitant was obviously the only bird there that did not know how to behave. Flapping around in its cage! Feathers coming loose. Loud squawking. It had no idea what it was doing there, and neither did I.

Everyone was watching Hokusai. Oh, he was famous, that was true; even the Shogun had seen his pictures. The very fact that we were here showed the change in Edo. The refined Noh theatre and the Kano school of arts were losing fans amongst the aristocrats. The officially despised, tawdry, and cheeky Yoshiwara culture had never been more fashionable.

Hokusai rolled out the paper. I had put it together the day before. It was fifteen paces long. The ends would not lie flat. He gestured to the guards: You stand on that corner, hold it down. You on the other.

Ienari laughed again. Then he gestured to the guards that they should do as Hokusai wished. “Go,” he said to them, and four of them went.

I bet he hadn’t laughed like that since he was a nasty little boy putting worms in the maids’ noodles.

Sadanobu’s teeth clenched. But as the samurai clinked and rattled in their armour to their spots on the paper, certain nobles began to follow the Shogun’s lead and titter.

Hokusai scooped up the air in front of his body with his hands, indicating more laughter, more laughter. And the laughter got bigger, and now the corner-holders themselves were smiling sheepishly and it was not laughter at anyone—it was just laughter.

I put down the chicken’s cage.

Hokusai took up his mop. I mixed the blue indigo ink with water in a pail. He bent down and soaked the straw ends of the mop. He walked over to the paper, eyed it from this way and that, smiling to himself, waving to me.

Buncho, beside Sadanobu, straightened up from his deep bow. I saw his elegant, understated work and I saw something else: he too was smiling.

Hokusai got down on all fours and pushed his face near the paper. He lifted his mop from the bucket. A drop of paint fell from it. Sloppy. He looked at his audience and smiled. Then he lowered his brush to meet the paper at the exact point where the drip had fallen, beginning his work there.

Everyone could feel the change: he was unaware now, of the birds, the sky, the temple market, the waiting retinue. It did not matter that the Shogun was there. There were no more airs or poses. He began.

He painted a long blue line, walking with his mop the length of the paper. He pressed the giant brush, and twisted it, and pressed on the other side, getting the most of the ink. He created a long, wavy blue line. Even the chicken was quiet. I had been speaking to it. I had reassured it. But it was false reassurance; I did not know what its fate would be. Was it to be some sort of sacrifice?

Hokusai jerked his head at me. “Oei!” he hailed.

“Old Man!” I shouted back.

My next job was to produce the red ink, and this I did, with more water and a bowl.

“Oei! Bring the chicken.”

I opened the cage door. The chicken went berserk, flapping and squawking, but didn’t get out. I fished around in the cage with my hand. The chicken fought for its life and I could not get hold of it. There was a moment of chaos. The falcon sat disdainful, its head turned away. The dogs were sorely tempted, but they held. I finally got the flapping thing by its two legs and pulled it out of its cage, not without a great deal of raucous poultry noises, some soft cursing, and a cloud of small white feathers.

Hokusai came to me, his robe tucked up into his belt so you could see his scrawny thighs. I transferred the frantic flapping thing into my father’s hands. The bird hung upside down. Mine won’t be an elegant death, it seemed to say, not like those that had been rehearsed here so often. But it was resigned to it and ceased to flap.

Hokusai reversed the chicken so it was the right way up. It took two of us to dip its feet in the red paint. We got them good and wet. Hokusai walked back to stand at the top of his samurai-pegged paper with the wide blue ribbon waving along it. Then with a great flourish, he threw the chicken into the air. It was too much for one of the dogs, which broke and had to be beaten.

The chicken could not fly. Its wings had been clipped. It settled on the paper and ran. It ran with its paint-soaked feet down the blue and then back up the blue. It saw my father’s feet and veered off, ran back and jumped into the sky, and flapping hard, elevated itself a few feet and escaped out of our vision. But it left its red tracks all over the painting, brighter at first and then fading out to faint stains.

Everyone looked at the paper.

Hokusai presented his work to the Shogun.

“There,” Hokusai said, pointing at the paper. “The Tama River in autumn.”

The Shogun was delighted, and everyone cheered and clapped.

We walked home alone. We were weary but happy that we had won the competition.

“Oei, Oei,” he said. “Hey, you. You did well.”

“Hey, hey, Old Man,” I said. “You too.”

I
T BECAME PREDICTABLE.
I went with Sanba to his writing room, wherever that might be. He had a little mattress there and he would lie down on it, shifting to find a less lumpy bit. When he was settled, he would pat the space beside him and I would lie down. I’d fit myself along his body, he would grunt and pull me closer, part my wrapped kimono, and seek with his bony legs the length of me.

I wormed closer. He put his mouth to my ear, the back of my neck, my shoulder. His lips were warm but his body was chill. I was strong and limber but not much of a furnace. No words escaped me, just a yelp of happiness, now and again, when he stroked me.

What did he think about, making love to Ei? He knew me when I was six. He saw me grow up. In the studio he had seen drawings of my body parts. This was nothing unusual. I believed that he chose me for my spirit, as my father had. There were thousands of lower-class prostitutes, nighthawks, and temple singers: women for view and for sale. But one has to pay even the lowliest of these. One does not have to pay the daughter. But of the daughters, why Ei? The others were worth more, weren’t they?

Whatever else, I had no shame. I was healthy and young and there was truth to me. And maybe it had brought me here, where I was happy.

“You surprise me, Ei.”

“I do? Why?” I said, digging for compliments.

“You are not humble.” His little cough, as always.

I fit myself neatly on top of his penis, which, I am happy to say, stood hard and at a good angle. I sat on his lower stomach, backing up a little on my hands and legs. His face was directly beneath my face, his breast directly beneath my chest and my tiny, upright nipples. My knees were on either side of his hips. I squeezed them and rolled him a little, side to side.

“By that you mean I ought to be,” I said.

I threw off the blankets. My eyes were used to the dark by then. I wanted to see the curved lines of his body against the blanket. I wanted to see everything.

When I rose from Sanba’s bed, weary and collecting my clothes to go home, I often thought of Shino. I had become a woman now. I wondered if she wished she could see me, if she still hoped that I had become elegant in speech and thought, like her. It was the only sadness in my life for those years. She was gone and there was no chance, in that teeming city where the townspeople had no second name, that I could find her.