The Ghost Brush (118 page)

The visitors left their coins folded in beautifully painted paper. I sent the boy to buy a plain box for his ashes. Neighbour women came from the tenements. They sat beside me sewing his death clothes of bleached cotton. I smiled with them at my clumsiness. “She who paints but does not sew” was sewing. I washed his body myself. We dressed him, and the apprentices put him in the coffin. Katsushika Isai was there and Kosho. They jostled for position around his corpse.

I found brushes, ink pots, and rolls of paper. I took the powder of some of my deepest pigments and tucked them in small cups. These cups I wrapped in fine paper. I wrapped all of this in a cloth and tied it at the top. I tucked the package beside his body.

The priest came from the temple and chanted the Pillow Sutra by his side.

T
hat night people kept arriving. They brought soba noodles in broth, his favourite dish. It was important to be merry, and I was. I heard my voice, echoing in the silence where his had been.

When they left, and before the dawn, I began to paint. I wanted to paint a beautiful lantern for the procession, and that is what I did. As my brush moved of its own accord, I mourned. There had been no luxury, no ease in our life, and none in his death. I had not objected to this, as my mother had done. To have done so would have been to break faith with my father. But now, for this day, I wished for one formal kimono to wear, just once in my life.

In the morning a temple messenger came with a large box: a kimono and all the attendant belts and ties. “The nun left it with us for you. It belonged to her when she was a married woman.” It was lavender with purple iris and red-headed cranes.

The women dressed me, tying the wide obi in place. Outside the procession formed. I had made many models of funeral processions with the keshi ningyo dolls. I knew the order by heart: first lanterns, then paper flowers and fresh flowers, and finally caged birds which would be released later, to bring merit to him. Then came the incense burners and the memorial tablet covered with thin silk, and finally the coffin.

“This shabby quarter has never seen so fine a funeral,” said the unagi seller.

We fell in line. The disciples one by one—Katsushika Isai; Tsuyuki Kosho; Hokuba; Sori III; Suzuki Hokusai II; Taito II, who had travelled from Osaka when he knew my father was failing. Takai Kozan sent his representatives. And simpler folk: those in the quarter from whom we bought the skewered fish and the charcoal for the kotatsu and the sandals. Tosaki-san, who made the famous sweet that Hokusai loved, was weeping. My friend Yasayuke the storyteller. Shino, of course. Samurai and priests and scholars, and yes, court ladies. Even the bakufu were present.

There were the publishers and artist friends in their suspicious droves, eyeing one another. They had buried Hokusai ten years ago. But now, finally, he was stilled. Death had caught him. It had caught his friends first, and his wives and most of his children too. Only I was left.

But no, there was family: Sakujiro and Tachi; even the dreadful Monster Boy, crying crocodile tears.

We were one hundred in all when we walked the short distance through the tenements on the temple grounds to the old quarter of Umamichi, one mile away. They said that only male relatives should carry objects, but I insisted. I carried the lantern I had painted. At the temple we set our items on an altar. We offered incense and the priest chanted. We handed out sweet bean jelly in shape of lotus flowers and leaves; that was our obligation. Certain people who were not members of the funeral party pushed in amongst the crowd and got sweets, which they took away outside to sell.

My father would have put it in a picture.

After the funeral we carried the coffin to the cremation spot outside the city. I walked behind, carrying the certificate from the temple, a permit to burn. We arrived: the coffin was put in the oven, and the door was sealed and my paper stamped. We waited until dark. Firewood made a weak fire and cremation a bad smell, so it was always done at night.

Into the fire he went. I gaped. It seemed too soon. The flames leapt on his small offering. I hated it. It was his very life, not even one day ago. Who could be sure he had truly departed? Never would I allow my own bones to be burnt.

Whatever lived inside those ferocious bones snaked up to the stars leaving a dragon’s tail of white smoke.

45

Leiden

OUT OF THE DARK
along the narrow pavement came a flock of silent bicycles, each with a single lamp. Rebecca raised her eyes into the flying rain and dodged these apparitions that came bowling at her from several directions. Only after they passed did they reveal their seated, imperturbable riders.

The wind blew cold from the North Sea. Rebecca had decided she had to see those disputed Dutch paintings. She flew overnight from Toronto to Schiphol, took the train to Leiden, and walked to her hotel, pulling a little black suitcase on wheels. The hotel was an enormous old family house on a canal. Her room was on the top floor, with a small window-eye in the peak of the gable. And it too was cold.

So this was where the Miracle Doctor came when he was unceremoniously tossed out of Japan.

His house, just across the water, was an imposing, three-storey “classic canal house” with a big, white-framed front door. She went in, paid her euros, and wandered through the high-ceilinged rooms. She felt a sadness in them, the sadness of his exile. He had lost wife and child, and the country he loved. God-like, he had brought Western medicine to the Japanese. Then, a fallen deity, he had contented himself with bringing Japan’s strange world—tiny people, elaborate rituals, beautiful pictures—to a dazzled Europe. He lived here thirty years. Before his death he donated most of his collection to the state. The rest he kept in this house.

His descendants spoke out of television screens. He had two families, one Japanese, the other Dutch. The Japanese descended from that little four-year-old daughter who had waved goodbye from the fishing boat in Nagasaki harbour. They seemed cowed: in the intervening eras, European blood had been nothing to boast of. But his daughter had been eminent, midwife to the royal family, and each generation had told the one that followed they carried the blood of the great von Siebold.

But his Dutch descendants, born of his second marriage, were entirely different; they lived in a castle, and boasted. A great-great-grandson remarked how von Siebold got his information by “indirect means.” “Curiosity was his dominant characteristic,” he said, avoiding the word “spy.” He showed the hollow walking stick with the end that unscrewed. “He stashed seeds in it,” said the Dutch descendant. He failed to mention the top hat with the hidden compass inside. Von Siebold must have destroyed it before his interrogation, Rebecca thought.

I
THOUGHT THE SAME
. Our minds moved in the same way now, at the same time: Rebecca knew as much about me as I seemed to remember myself.

We stood in the garden behind the house, where a stone bust looked out with lustreless eyes. Did he really look like that, with the arched, sceptical eyebrow and the high military collar? Rebecca wondered. Could Oei really have loved that stiff? Was he not kinder, more amusing?

Whereas I was undone by the sight of him. It was true; in the bust, his tenderness was lost. It had been of the flesh; you had to infer it when you read that he wrapped tiny tea plants in ferrous clay so they would stay alive long enough to reach Java. You had to understand it in his careful, piercing attention to the flowers, the hydrangea, the spirea, the verbena, the beautiful maples, the wisteria, and the roses. The fabulous lilies with the pink spots that live here in cold northern Europe because of the care he took.

We came back in and looked at his notebooks.

I remember those, filled with dried stems, leaves, blooms—all glued down, with his signature at the bottom right. He gave them names. He assessed and catalogued every mysterious particle of life that came into his hands, counting its parts, number of stamens, number of seeds. What was it he had said about that man Linnaeus, from Sweden, a more northerly, even colder place than his homeland?

“God creates, man orders.”

T
HE NEXT MORNING REBECCA WENT
to the Volkenkunde, the Museum of Folk Arts. Freezing, she walked briskly. She’d seen the building the day before. But confusing little waterways ran under small, humped bridges and wound back around themselves. At last she found it, a sprawling property near the station.

The building used to be a hospital. It had tile walls, cold and bright. Noises echoed. In my spirit world they were still screaming, the disorders that had met their match here, and were violently tamped down. They echoed and I shuddered. The tile must have made it easy to clean up the blood, the vomit, the urine. But it was heartless, somehow.

Apparently, for
180
years, our “Dutch” pictures had been stored upstairs. Scholars had looked at them, from time to time, and gone away scratching their heads. “They’re weird,” they said. Some said, “Not Hokusai!” But more often they wrote their careful, respectful commentaries.

The pictures had never been exhibited in Holland. Now we would see them. I sped along the corridor after the assistant’s clacking heels and Rebecca’s less officious but equally keen footsteps.

First the watercolours. The curator’s assistant laid them on a large viewing table. There was the museum stamp on their backs, and his initials, VS.

The first one was Two Women and a Boy at the Time of the Boys’ Festival.

“The colours are odd,” murmured Rebecca.

“Yes. Because they were painted on Dutch paper. It makes them more pastel.”

She stared. The red shoki hiding behind a banner looked like other red demons signed by Hokusai. But that didn’t necessarily mean he painted it. It could have been the studio style. Or someone else could have painted all the red demons that are thought to be Hokusai’s.

There were drafting lines in pencil under the paint, she thought. And the composition was not entirely successful. (I am the first to admit it.) The picture was full of interesting things, but they didn’t fit together.

On the other hand, it would be a rare male artist who would paint a nursing mother.

A large fish-shaped kite hung from the top border. A woman sat with her breast bared, about to receive a struggling baby, whom, presumably, she was going to nurse. Or perhaps she had finished nursing him and was handing him off. It wasn’t clear. The second woman, with the child in her arms and many elaborate hairpins, was stiff as well. The child’s hands and feet were disproportionately large.

“The bodies don’t move,” Rebecca muttered. “Not in the way Hokusai’s do.”

The assistant nodded.

“There are no little dogs in the corner biting people’s ankles or distant views of hills. The perspective is off: the rooftops behind seem to be attached to the back rail.” She was embarrassed to say it, aware that she wasn’t an expert. “The fabrics are nice, and the draping is good, but it has no focus.”

She remembered John Carpenter’s mea culpa: “I learned to look with the eyes of others.”

Rebecca examined the hands and fingers, first of the women and then of the baby boy. They were all the same, the familiar fingers she has come to see as Oei’s signature, her trademark. The palm was fleshy and the first joint of the thumb round, as was the ball of the foot under the big toe. Then the digits themselves tapered immediately, becoming long and slender. Looking with her own eyes, she did not believe Hokusai did this painting.

T
he pencil lines were my way of dealing with perspective, and yes, thank you, I was experimenting.

New Year’s Day at Kasumigaseki was similar, the background of buildings all geometrical. I had put strong black in the centre of the page to anchor it. My father had commanded from his sickbed, “P-p-put some life in it!”

“Dogs in the bottom corner?”

“Co-co-copulating.”

They weren’t, but they were sniffing each other.

Next came my samurai horsemen, with their white silk reins, their white gloves and jackets too, their horses with their wild warrior eyes. On they went in their wide S past the viewer, in the service of some lord, heads over the horses’ necks, faces covered by round helmets, their two swords over the bulging flanks of the animals. Anonymous. Entitled to run over us—any of us—for no reason. A scene we had witnessed, my father and I, more than once.

“Oh, look at the beautiful horses,” von Siebold had said when I showed him.

But he missed its meaning. Light came at them from two directions, left and right; they threw no shadow. There was nothing else—nothing in the sky or on the ground—but dusty footprints. The peasants beside the road were still as posts.

U
p came
A Merchant Making Up the Accounts at the End of the Year.
Again, it was on the Dutch paper. There were pencil lines in the furniture, the straight-edged structures. But there were fine, fine threads in the tartans of their kimono and furnishings. It had gone pastel, but you knew those were deep colours to begin with.

It was a better picture. The merchant bent over his abacus making sums while a man looked on. The merchant’s wife was about to serve tea. She had plump hands with long, graceful fingers. So did the merchant. And there was a coiled white cat with a red ribbon around his neck. It did not seem like a Hokusai cat. A Hokusai cat would be stretching; it would be chasing a mouse. This was an Oei cat, curled in on itself in a tight ball.