The Ghost Brush (101 page)

Conclusion: since he painted the pictures, the palsy was “intermittent.”

What was wrong with this line of reasoning? Weren’t they putting the cart before the horse? And what was that called?

Begging the question—because in order to accept the conclusion you have to accept the premises.

You had to accept that Hokusai painted the picture, and be prepared to ditch the idea that he had palsy.

The experts put the palsy on hold for the periods when there were fine paintings. But certain other paintings of his show an uncontrolled hand. The Japanese curator at the Freer symposium noted: “Some of these paintings from his old age look as if he was drunk!” And then sarcastically: “No, I forgot: he didn’t drink.” But by and large, people accepted the paintings and questioned the palsy. The pictures are signed and sealed, but the palsy has become a footnote in history. Yet, as John Carpenter said: “Anyone can copy a calligraphy signature. And anyone can use a seal.”

What was this palsy? Rebecca got busy again and sent off messages to the National Library of Medicine at the Library of Congress. What was “palsy” in Edo in
1825
or
1830
? What disease? What did it look like? What was the treatment? Could it be “intermittent”—that is, cured or put into remission, to return later?

There was no hard information. Most people thought palsy was a stroke.

Strangely, however, while casting around, Rebecca found quite by accident a reference to a book by Shikitei Sanba. It was called Bathhouse of the Floating World.

E
ven I, denizen of a supernatural world, was amazed.

She tapped the words into her computer. She leaned, she stared, she tapped some more. She put her fingers on her lips. The words she wrote were keys to more words, as if the strings of letters reached through her screen into some great cumulus cloud of ghostly previous writings. Not ghostly in the physical way I am, but an entire other galaxy of all the ideas that had been given form in words. And out of that galaxy she could pluck what she wanted.

A message came back: she could buy the book from a particular merchant. Within five days, Shikitei Sanba’s yellow-back novel arrived at her door in shirred cardboard wrapping.

I shrank when I saw it. I trembled. It is not easy to scare a figment. But what did this mean? Was all the stuff of my life out there, revolving? If she asked for it, could she call it up from oblivion? Did nothing die, not anymore? Of course, people died. Plants, trees. But not written works. They hang on. What was it Ellis said? They are Taoist. They give way, and so they are not destroyed: they get a second life in the physical world.

I sat on the stair and eyed that book. Sanba was on to something with those Immortals’ Formula Longevity Pills. I remembered when he had moved into the upstairs room over his publisher’s to write it. It seemed not so long ago, but it was about
190
years. I remembered him selling it at the counter in his cosmetics shop near Nihonbashi. It was very popular.

Of course, it has taken a new form. It looks different now. Now it is translated into English by a Professor Robert Leutner and published by Harvard University Press. It has a hard cover and glossaries and footnotes and an introduction.

Rebecca opened the page and my once-upon-a-time lover’s wry, wise voice rolled out:

There is, one realizes on careful reflection, no shortcut to moral learning like the public bath. It is after all the way of Nature and of Heaven and Earth that all are naked when they bathe—the wise and the foolish, the crooked and the straight, the poor and the rich, the high and the low . . . As surely as an evening’s red-faced drunkard is ashen and sober in the morning bath, the only thing separating the new-born baby’s first bath from the cleansing of the corpse is life, fragile as a paper screen.

He wrote just the way he spoke. Beautifully. The self-mocking tone, the sly scatological jokes that were so popular with the Mad Poets:

I took up the brush on the
9
th day of the
9
th month of the previous autumn and, after partaking of the sweet potato that is
de rigueur
at moon-viewing parties in that month, I farted forth this little volume.

The bathhouse of the floating world opens at dawn, when the city’s silence is broken only by the cries of the crows and the bellowing hawkers of tofu. The first man approaches and, for a few cents, gets in the door. In minutes he is joined by others, and we’re treated to the scene of old men tossing off their loincloths and comparing their medical problems. They diagnose an absent friend with “cormorant” disease, because he throws up everything he eats.

Meanwhile, on the women’s side, girls in the entertainment business complain about the puffy eyes they get because customers insist they drink all night. There are scuffles with the water bucket; someone slips and falls on the wooden platform, and the water boy is harassed to make the bath first hotter and then colder.

People sing in the public bath. “Came a lantern, creeping near . . . Love, oh love, oh faithless love!”

Two old nuns appear, leaning on staffs with jingling bells attached: chirrin, chirrin. Then priests come to beg at the bathhouse. A man brings his son and daughter, and there is a lot of talk about how the little girl has no weenie, but the boy has one. Still, weenie or no, the girl is braver in the hot water.

Outside, peddlers go by, selling dumplings, sweet peas, bean curd, broiled eel . . .

Rebecca seemed to be enjoying the read. But then she got very interested. A character called Butashichi falls down on the platform. Although only thirty, he “slouches along like some sort of crawling bug; he was a victim of a kind of palsy popularly known as the yoi-yoi disease.” His speech is slurred and he stutters.

He passes out. The charm to bring him around is to write “horse beans” on his back. They also throw water on the spastic, as they call him. He comes to. They tell him he’s passed out. “All righ.’ I-I-I’m f-fine. I p-passed b-back, passed b-back in!”

His speech is painful to hear. He stumbles and falls. His legs jerk; he loses his balance and has to be picked up off the ground. His remedies, apparently, other than the “horse beans” charm, are to chant the Lotus Sutra.

Which Hokusai did all the time.

Rebecca rocked back in her chair, closing her eyes and pressing her forefinger and thumb to the centre of her eyeballs. That was the palsy.

I rocked back too. Sanba’s little book had come back to speak on my behalf.

L
IFE, LIKE ART, IS FULL OF INCIDENT
. Some people’s more than others’.

My father’s life, like his art, was broad, scattered with figures, events, characters, exertion everywhere—up planks and up mountains, across rivers, on platforms—twinkling and never dull. There was no emphasis. Everything was in competition; anything could distract the eye. A little man at the edge of the paper carrying a bucket will be given his humorous face and his odd posture to amuse. And in the centre a woman bid her lover farewell. These were equal in importance. The whole place is buzzing. At any time, in any place, someone was putting out for the audience, and none of this merited his indifference.

But my life was not.

Not that way.

My life was like a painting on silk, intense but softened. It was a dark splatter of blood on an empty canvas. Examined carefully, it was not just a splash but a cluster—figures pushed together, too close, against each other. These figures are distinct, they are technical, they are dark and deeply impressed. But they float in space, mere space, empty space that makes them severe. Beyond my immediate world was emptiness. Great events and signs were absent for years on end. Then they all came at once.

32

Dark Years

MY FATHER WAS NOT MUCH BETTER
, although every day he rose to say that he was cured. The censors continued their attacks, and times were dark. Often, as I worked on small commissions, I returned in my mind to my conversations with the Miracle Doctor, and to the scenes he had conjured: kings and queens of Europe swirling in each other’s arms in a place called “ballroom.” A man in a great forest drawing the birds as they nested. Wild people wearing feather headdresses and building conical houses of animal skin at the foot of giant mountains, each peak as high as Fuji-san. The idea of the world beyond our gated and moated city gave me comfort, I suppose. I hoped too that one day I would come across Shino on the street, her shaven eyebrows and simple hairstyle leaving her face all the more visible. I even wondered if I had passed her, one year or another, and not known her.

We were sad, which was why my father and I maintained our little games. Hokusai massaged his tongue. He stuck it in and out, and I laughed at him. He put it to work again telling ghost stories. There was one about sailors who drowned in a typhoon. It took more patience than I possessed to listen to him, but I begged it from the gods. Suddenly he was all I had, and I was all he had.

“Their b-b-bodies were ca-arried aw-way by the w-w-waves! Bu’ lader, much lader, their gho-oo-osts were seen in the w-w-white foam. And they were sin-sin-s-singing!”

His goofy laugh was stretched out of shape. I made tea of Chinese herbs for him, while he chanted—in his drunken way—the Lotus Sutra. He stood on his head and swung his feet; his balance was better that way. I had to duck walking across the room or get hit by a flying foot. He stood on one leg with the other folded on his thigh, holding the wall. He fell, like a rubber man, and could not get up. He moaned and spit. He got me to rub his feet and had the herbalist come to stick paper poultices on his back, with magical inscriptions written on them. He prayed to the North Star whenever he could see it. I made pigments while he made circles to retrain his hand.

His heart was sick too. He had taken on the name Iitsu, meaning “one again,” six years before, in anticipation of a new life. But his renewed youth hadn’t materialized. He was well past sixty in years, and most of his peers were dead. He had illustrated books; he had made instruction manuals; he had created shunga. He was tired of the city and its vices. He wanted to paint the seas and the skies; these subjects had been difficult to do, with our fugitive blues.

Now here was beru, a new toy, and the Old Man came slowly alive. He prepared for a day of painting by rubbing the muscles of his feet, stretching his leg up to his nose, and hooking his arms around his back while opening and shutting his mouth. Our studio was quiet. Shigenobu was gone, my mother and sisters dead, my brother apprenticed to an account keeper. The men who had thought to learn from Hokusai had moved on. I got Hokusai’s ink ready and his water. He made a hundred sketches but his hand would not do what he willed it to. He gazed at Berlin blue to spur on his recovery.

I told him about the compass in the hat. We pictured the Dutch doctor measuring the sacred mountain over and over, from different vantage points along the road to Edo, and finding it unchanged. In his telescope sacred Fuji winked from under a cloud or behind a bridge, through the hoop of a barrel, under the curl of a wave. We laughed about this. Hokusai had the idea of drawing these views of Fuji-san. The publisher loved it. There was a cult in Edo that worshipped the Peerless One. All the adherents would buy the prints.

And now he had the blue that would make sea and sky resplendent. One day he would be well enough to use it. But he had to learn to walk again.

I
walked in the lawless open space along the riverbank, passing the haggling drunks and the temple dancers. The water was low and the sun slanted across it. Eagles swooped down on the stranded fish, then rose flapping over the twisted, brilliant strands of water, leaving shadows on the surface. My hands were stained turquoisey black with
beru.

I had gone directly to my father’s house when I left Tokei-ji temple. What choice did I have? He needed looking after and I needed a home. No one had asked for papers when I re-entered Edo. A bird leaving a cage must be cunning and find the exact moment. A bird returning to a cage finds the door ajar.

We were not selling much work. Hokusai did not paint; he could only dream of the sacred mountain and the roads he would take to see it. My themes were gloomy: a sketch of an attempted rape; my father as an immortal, playing with a pet toad.

Still, I had at least achieved a measure of peace. My cage was comfortable. In two years I had reverted to being an unmarried daughter. There was no other choice. My father still suffered from his palsy. It was expected that I keep his work alive. What did we live on? No one actually asked, and if they did, they did not get a truthful answer. I affected a bizarre posture that kept people from approaching me, my head leaning steeply on the angle as if my neck had been broken. I scowled to show that I did not conform to female ways. I made my way around the city, to the publisher with designs, to the market for butterfish and soba noodles. I loved these errands. I had certain reasons for happiness: I was painting, and I had met the Dutch doctor.