The Printmaker's Daughter (14 page)

“Where is the sea?”

“I told you. We’re nearly there. Can’t you smell it?”

I sniffed. It’s true the air was different. Salty.

“You’ll like it. It’s a great beast that sleeps and wakes. It roars and it moans and it is its own master.”

“What about your publisher?”

“I want no more publishers. I will make poetry cards and sell them on my own. I will make volumes of laughing pictures for rich women.”

Farther along we came to a teahouse. Beside the teahouse was a workshop where a man and his family were carving the thumb-sized wooden charms we called
netsuke.
Hokusai sketched them. I picked up the charms—a fat Buddha, a fox, a sleeping cat, a stove. I wished I could have one. I could hold it in my palm and tighten my fingers around it. I could hide it in my sleeve when I got my kimono back. We all hid our valuable things, not because we feared their being stolen but because we were not allowed indulgences. Our luxuries were invisible, like the paintings merchants commissioned for the linings of their coats.

Clouds came over and the sky was threatening. It was still only the third day of the new year. Spring, but not warm. Soon it would rain. We came to a post town, the dark buildings tight and seamless against the sides of the road—inns and stables and, up a few stairs, a small roadside temple under red arches. We would have gone in to sit by a warm stove, but something was happening. A man who made straw shoes for horses was setting up his barrow. A noodle vendor lit a fire under a big vat of water. I saw peasants leading lame children, blind ancients, pregnant wives.

“What shrine are we coming to?” I asked the noodle man.

He laughed. “It is no shrine at all. The Dutch traders are on their way to Edo to present themselves to the shogun. The procession will be here by nightfall. One of them is a doctor of medicine.”

The Dutch, alone among foreigners, were allowed to trade in our country. Hokusai said it was because they were prepared to step on their holy book. They did this to assure the shogun that they wouldn’t preach in favor of their Christian gods. “It seems a strange reason to trust someone,” he told me when I asked. I thought again of the time I had seen the redheaded devils through the high window of the Nagasakiya when my father went to sketch the picture. I remembered the roar that went up when they came out the door in front of the crowds. These were also men, I realized, to whom money was a god.

Four years earlier, a captain of the Dutch had come to our house. He asked Hokusai to prepare two scrolls showing incidents in the life of a Japanese from birth to death, one for a female, one for a male. These were for the first in command. The price he offered was 150
ryo.
The captain also wanted a second set, for himself, and offered the same price. He said that the entourage would remain in Edo only ten days more, and that the work must be finished by the time it left.

The sum was enormous. There was dancing in the studio: as usual we had no money and the redheaded barbarians were going to save the day. But the time was short, and we all had to work.

My sisters ground the pigments and dissolved them in water. As the youngest, I cleaned brushes and ran errands. My father drew funeral processions and weddings and festivals, imagining what the foreigners would want to see. The students positioned themselves along the length of the scrolls and filled in the colors where they were told.

Even so, it was too large a task; someone always had to be working on the scrolls, and so we rarely slept. Hokusai did not want to compromise his high standard. “We must tell the Dutch that we cannot have the scrolls finished in ten days’ time,” he said finally.

I was the messenger. Captain Hemmy, with his frizzy cloud of sun-colored hair, leaned over me and boomed that the Dutch had no more time in the capital and would have to leave without the scrolls. I ran back to the studio with the dreadful news. But my father only grunted and continued his painstaking drawings of temple bells. Nothing, not even cancellation, would disturb his work.

But luckily for us, the shogun delayed the foreigners’ appearance before him. One day and then another, the Dutch waited to be called to the castle. We all continued to work on the scrolls. It was as if the shogun was helping us, but of course he would not have if he knew. He forbade this trade.

Four days later we finished the scrolls.

I ran to the Nagasakiya with the news. We were asked to bring them that same day.

The
opperhoofd
was very pleased with his scroll and produced the gold
ryo
exactly as had been promised. But Captain Hemmy put his spectacles down his nose and set the scrolls side by side. He compared his to his superior’s, unrolling them together, inch by inch.

Hokusai looked up and looked around. He made a little musical noise with his lips. He farted.

“Both the same? Both from your hand?”

Hokusai did not deign to answer.

Captain Hemmy let his spectacles fall off his downspout of a nose to his chest.

“I believe mine are copies,” he said. “They are inferior. The price should be exactly one half.”

It was a terrible insult.

Without speaking, and with enormous dignity, Hokusai wrapped up his kimono in the front of his thighs and cleared his throat with that hiss I knew so well. He stepped forward and carefully, even gingerly, rolled up the second set of scrolls. He did not bow. He took me by the hand and we walked out. The large wooden door closed behind us, and we were back in the streets of Japan.

At home my mother took the 150
ryo
and asked for the other 150. My father showed her that we still had the second scrolls. “He tried to cheat me.”

She screamed. “You have the airs of a lord and the ways of a peasant! Why are you so proud?”

“You know nothing.”

“We need this money. Half of it is spent already.”

He shrugged.

“Do you deny it? Look at this child. He is hungry!” She pushed my little brother under his nose. I guess we girls weren’t hungry?

You couldn’t escape their fights in our small rooms. My sisters and I wormed our way into the corner and covered our ears, but the shouts penetrated all the same. “Where is that useless older brother? He should be bringing money into this house!”

“Woman, beware! Curse the children of my dead wife,” Hokusai said, “and you will bring down demons on your head.”

“And you, Tokitaro”—she called him by his birth name to remind him he was nothing much—“you love the dead and not the living. You love yourself and not your faithful wife. One hundred and fifty
ryo
would save this household from great misery.”

I prayed that she would be silent. But the woman sailed out in gusty lament, moving in circles like a hawk in a gale. At last she exhausted herself and collapsed.

“You waste yourself in rage,” he said. “But I forgive you.” He spoke gently. “You cannot help it. You do not understand me, and you will never understand me.”

My mother wept.

“Which part of our poverty do you think I don’t feel?” Hokusai said. “The cold and wet? The shabby garments? The way I work through the night? The way this child runs errands, as I did as a boy? The way, even though my mastery is accepted all over Japan, we have meals of rice alone?

“You may think this is misery,” the Old Man went on, “but there’s something worse. That’s when a stranger—a barbarian—holds me in low regard. When he says I have not done my best work.” He was good, that far. Then he lost it. He flung his arms out and stamped. “Anyway, he is a bad man. He is not a good person. Unpleasant airs emanate from him.”

“They eat beef, is all,” she said.

“I don’t care what they eat.”

“You don’t care what
we
eat.” She ripped through his words with a shriek.

“I care about respect.”

“You cannot eat respect.”

“Yes, I can.”

He popped his eyes, sat with knees high and feet crossed, slurped and burped and rubbed his stomach. I fell into a giggling heap. My older sisters hated him for teasing my mother. She began to moan. My younger brother sat staunch with his eyes on the pathetic little fire in our hearth. Sakujiro was so quiet. My mother slung him around from hip to hip like a bag of rice. He was a mystery to us all. But I suspected he was not stupid.

“See, Wife, that’s your problem: you can’t laugh.”

“Laugh?” my mother shouted. “No, but I can cry.”

That made an end to it for an hour or two. But then he asked her to serve him an empty bowl at dinner, and she did. He sat with his chopsticks, lifting his invisible dinner to his lips, smiling and winking at me, the accomplice.

“Your hunger may be in your big head, but you can’t pull off your magic with me,” said my mother. “Mine is in my belly.”

It was simple: Hokusai lived on invisible things, the good as well as the bad. It was an unfair fight, I knew that. He had a genius for taunting. He used words nearly as well as he used a brush. He was an actor. His ghost stories went to bed with me and his jokes woke me up. I understood the Old Man; my mother didn’t.

I felt superior to her. My father and I both did.

That night we went to the Yoshiwara, hoping for a glimpse of Shino.

The next day it began again.

“Your daughters are cold because we have no coal for the fire. Your son . . .” She pointed to the boy. He was poking the fire with a little stick, expressionless. He was a spooky kid, I admit. Even she had no words for him. “You paint all the beautiful ladies who are for sale, while I, your virtuous wife, have only one kimono—”

“Oh, this is tiresome, tiresome,” he said. He had been up all night. He spoke quietly while bent over a sketch. “For the sake of argument, let’s call this misery. What I am saying is that I prefer misery to humiliation.”

“Why?” she said. “Humiliation is nothing to me. Humiliation is a mosquito to be waved away. Misery is in the bones.”

“Your ideas are from the old times, from the peasant times, the distant past,” charged Hokusai. “You have no pride. Pride is in the spirit; where is yours?”

But later, when they lay on their mat and were lovers again, he spoke tenderly. He rolled her frontward and back again, like a package, to get free of her wrapping. He propped her on her knees and knelt behind her. “Do it this way and you’ll be in the pictures,” he said. “Isn’t that what you want?”

“It is not the laughing pictures I want to be in!”

“But I can teach you.” He laughed and she cried. Then she wheedled. I was young, but I had heard many women wheedle.

“Tell me, Husband, don’t you wish you had taken the hundred and fifty
ryo?
”

Shino would never have said that.

T
HE NEXT DAY,
lo and behold, Captain Hemmy and his Japanese escort appeared at our door again. I was sent out to tell their translator that my father was too busy to see him.

“I understand,” he said. “But we are very patient.”

They sat by the door all day. When evening came, I admitted the translator. He bowed very low and asked forgiveness for suspecting Hokusai of making a copy. Captain Hemmy had reconsidered. He would like to have his scrolls and he had brought the money.

My father didn’t want to sell, I knew. But my mother’s sheer volume had made an impression. “You will have to inspect the studio books,” he said to me, “to see if the scrolls are still available.”

I went to the other room and played with the cats for a long time, and then I brought the scrolls to where the translator waited and so it was done. We paid our debts and my mother was happy for a time, and when he laughed, she laughed as well.

Later the news came that Captain Hemmy had died on the long journey back to Nagasaki.

“Oooh! Do you see? Do you see what happened? I told you so!” said Hokusai. And oohed and aahed. “Do you see? I told you he was full of an evil spirit. It overcame him, and he is gone. Probably he had an imbalance of the four grains. He was filled with bile. Even the Western medicine could not save him.”

Hokusai prayed, he chanted, he took his Chinese herbs and breathed incense. He wanted to expunge the Dutch captain.

I sometimes wondered what happened to the scrolls Hemmy bought when he died. No one knew. Maybe they traveled to Europe with one of his party. Perhaps they were sold there and started the fame that would make our life a little easier, before it made it much more difficult.

12.

The Waves

N
OW IT WAS
four years after that encounter with the Dutch. We sat by the side of the Tokaido, among the peasants and noodle sellers. We had decided to wait to see the barbarians again. Hokusai sketched. I had a brush myself, which I used to practice characters. By the time the noodles were cooked, the procession had appeared. At first it was a cloud of dust, far down the road. Then it was noise—drums, whips, neighing of the horses. We were supposed to kneel and bow, but my father wouldn’t, so instead we moved back from the road into the rushes.