The Ghost Brush (120 page)

Yes, yes, yes.

Of course the researchers were Japanese speakers. “I wonder if anyone has searched the newspapers in English for a notice of Oei’s death?” Rebecca ventured. “In case she had become known amongst foreigners?”

John Carpenter translated.

Kobayashi-sensei repeated that he believed it was impossible to trace what happened to her. People had tried.

“But in English?” she persisted. Might her death have been suppressed in Japan but recorded in an English paper of the time?

He shrugged elaborately, meaning, Go ahead. Investigate. He opened his hands to her over the table, as if to say, You are welcome.

There was a silence. Rebecca felt she was being mildly put in her place for impertinence. Then Kobayashi-sensei spoke again. He mused about an earlier well-known Japanese artist, who removed all traces of himself because he got in trouble with the Shogun.

What if Oei chose to disappear?

The students listened carefully. I rattled my neck plates with glee. How wonderful that
150
years later, they sat a world away from old Edo and pondered the fate of Miss Tipsy. How delicious that the third in line should study the likes of me.

Of course, we did have something in common: neither she nor I had a surname. I ranked too low to merit one, and she ranked so high she didn’t need one. It was just the sort of joke Hokusai and I would have chortled over. I didn’t laugh this time, though, because I wanted to hear what was coming.

A
fter dinner John Carpenter and Rebecca walked out of the restaurant and into the dark, empty London street. Andrew and Peter and the Kobayashis followed. The two graduate students set off for their underground station with small rolling suitcases. I stayed behind, looking at the disappearing back of Akiko, trailing her majesty.

The rest of them turned towards Farringdon Road. John and Rebecca walked side by side. He spoke as a man bearing bad news. Remember, he could read the calligraphy and had been looking at documents and pictures for years. “I’m afraid you won’t find anything more,” he said. “From here on in, it’s mostly speculation.”

Hokusai was an “alpha male,” said Carpenter. You couldn’t beat him. You couldn’t outlive him. At a time when life expectancy was fifty years, Hokusai went on to ninety. The men in his studio were not willing to be subsumed. One by one in Hokusai’s lifetime, they left—Shigenobu, Eisen, many others.

So he had to fall back on women. In the North Star Studio he used a series of them who were willing to work anonymously. As Hokusai was one of the few artists who worked with women, they were captive labour. They didn’t have the option to establish themselves as artists in their own right, or to find another studio.

So far, Rebecca was with him.

From around
1804
, in Hokusai’s small, family-run Katsushika studio, the male pupils were shed and the females carried out his work. First the woman painter Hokumei, who received two important seals from Hokusai. Then the daughter who used the art name Tatsu-jo, meaning “daughter of the dragon.” Then Oei. She was a better painter than her father, more patient, but most of the time she let her father sign her work. She worked on the prints done under the name Iitsu. She painted a number of the later Katsushika-sealed paintings. In the final years, she did many.

She was the ghost painter. This was an open secret amongst scholars. John Carpenter stated it clearly. Others just hinted. To some it was a kind of joke.

“I’ve often wondered,” drawled one distinguished professor at a Madison, Wisconsin, conference on Edo prints, “just how much of Hokusai’s work Oei did in his last decade.”

Sometimes there was a casual and unsurprised acceptance of the idea that the daughter was the true painter of a substantial number of “Hokusai” works. But other people showed a strange truculence. In the scholarly canon, there was an active unwillingness. Occasionally you found the phrase “people said.” As if rumour were still the main source of information. Another example of the collective memory.

W
hen Hokusai died, Carpenter said, “something happened.” Oei settled his affairs. But the family could not deal with her. She was difficult. He alluded to her dark and unhappy nature. For a time she continued to paint, signing some work with his name, some with her own.

Why? Rebecca interrupted. One presumed it was because the painting would bring in a higher price if it was signed by the master.

“You don’t understand,” Carpenter said. “Oei wanted her father to take the credit.”

“But isn’t there a contradiction in those two statements: Kobayashi’s that Oei wanted to make it on her own as an artist, and yours that Oei wanted her father to take the credit?”

He nodded sympathetically. Probably there was. The contradiction was still there. He recently wrote an essay to appear in a catalogue for the Asia Society. He mentioned Oei’s work, but the editor made him remove the references to her because they were “speculative.” It was unfortunate.

“Complicit” was the word that came to Rebecca’s mind. Scholars were complicit: knowledgeable, sensitive, aware, but when they ran up against canonical thinking, willing to let Oei and her reputation go out in the wash.

They walked along the wet, dark street. They went on talking. When the ancient alpha male died, the disciples had their chance at last. Who would inherit the seal? The studio of Hokusai was thrown into tumult. Oei was already depressed, with her father gone, unable to make a living as “one brush,” and under pressure from her family to behave like a normal “old woman.”

Something very dark happened, said John Carpenter, to end Oei’s life. She may have done something. “It may have been the drinking.” He faltered. He did not want to upset Rebecca. “Or something . . . more destructive.”

They were stopped, standing dead centre in the shiny and wet black street. Everything was pavement and stone, grey with long white streaks of light. They were dwarfed by the empty buildings with their blank windows.

Rebecca gagged.

Was that a little easy? Don’t we always believe that women artists extinguish themselves, for want of fame or self-love, or because they were not normal to begin with?

Rebecca knew she was sounding overly engaged. She was an amateur and was arguing with experts whose life work this was. But she did not want to believe Oei destroyed herself.

Was it even true that she couldn’t make a living as “one brush”? Rebecca had become curious about all these different seals and signatures. She mentioned the last-known paintings, the pair called Chrysanthemums. She’d seen pictures of them. Kubota had written about them. They were highly distinct, detailed, and they had been owned by a museum in Obuse, the mountain retreat where Oei and Hokusai had fled. There was something strange about them: the scroll appeared to have been shortened, and the signature and seal, normally on the bottom right, was in the top left-hand corner. It appeared that the original signature had been cut off and a new one applied where there was still room for it. Kubota had remarked on it.

Did John know about the disappearance of Oei’s Chrysanthemums, and the reappearance of a nearly identical pair of paintings bearing the signature and seal of Hokusai? Did he know about the account book Kubota had found, which showed Kozan had bought them in
1853
, four years after her father’s death, for a higher price than he had ever paid Hokusai? Yes, that was correct: a higher price. That was in one of the articles Yusuke translated.

John knew about the paintings. He didn’t know about the receipt. He said, “You should meet the dealer who sold Chrysanthemums back to Obuse. He was quite convinced that they were by Oei.”

“Quite convinced” the paintings were by Oei? Yet he sold them to the Hokusai Museum as Hokusais? How did that work?

“Yes,” she said, “I’d love to meet that dealer.”

Suddenly they were all saying goodbye. John and Rebecca shook hands. Kobayashi-sensei and his wife disappeared into the underground at the end of the street. It began to rain.

“His name is Paul Zeller,” John said as he turned away.

47

The Wreckage

PAUL ZELLER WAS A SLIGHT
, youthful seventy-two-year-old in a red sweater. He opened the door to a beautiful flat near Primrose Hill, just down the block from a house with a blue heritage dot. “Sylvia Plath lived there. I’ve never read her. Should I?” he said.

He led Rebecca up the hall and upstairs to his sitting room, gestured to her to take a chair, and brought tea.

He said he was an expert in the paintings, as opposed to prints, of the Edo period. This was important. People think they can be experts in both, but they are very different fields. There was very little preamble. He did not mince his words as the scholars did. He identified himself almost immediately as being amongst the converted: it was true, he believed that Oei painted Chrysanthemums. The pair of scrolls was unique. The seal and signature were genuine, although they were oddly placed in the piece, at the top instead of the bottom.

He said how much the Japanese disliked women painters; he gave an example of a woman who painted a fabulous portrait he bought, but she was drummed out; it was another “disappearance.”

They discussed the difficulty of identifying works by Oei. Not so difficult as all that, he said. “Painters are creatures of habit. They do the same things over and over again.” In her case it was the fingers that he noticed. As Kubota had noticed. As Rebecca had noticed.

And her palette. It was completely her own, he said.

The fingers she painted were fleshy at the joint of the palm, then tapered to being thin at the end. Rebecca called them long and expressive. Hokusai’s were not the same, he said flatly. “That is how you can tell. That and her colours.” They agreed too that her women were rounder than her father’s. And the colours were saturated, flamboyant.

Agreed.

He told the story of Chrysanthemums.

In the early
1960
s, when he was just starting out, next to his office was a Phillips auction house. It had Monday auctions and Tuesday auctions. Monday the junk went out, and Tuesday was the good stuff.

It was on a Monday when he saw the scrolls, a pair of them: Chrysanthemums. He bought them. He hung them in his hallway at home. When he learned more he discovered that they were sealed and signed “Hokusai.”

“They are exquisite,” he said. “They’re like botanicals; every type of chrysanthemum known in Japan is there.”

In the
1970
s and
1980
s he tried to sell them. People from various museums looked at them, but they said, “They’re not Hokusai.” Then a young dealer from Japan came to the house. Zeller relayed that he had tried unsuccessfully to sell them for sixty thousand pounds. The young dealer said he could get him ten times that in Japan. Zeller sent them to Kyoto to be remounted.

Later in the
1980
s, once the paintings were in Obuse (because it was the Hokusai Museum that bought them), they were “denounced,” Zeller said.

“Because of the shortened scroll and the misplaced signature?” Rebecca asked.

“Absolutely not.”

He was vehement that the misplacement of the signature meant nothing. Sometimes scrolls were just signed in that place, he said. The seal was right. He could say absolutely that the scrolls had not been tampered with. But the signature was Hokusai’s.

“You say Oei signed ‘Hokusai’ even when she was asked to create these paintings after her father’s death?” This boggled her mind. “Why?”

“Frustration,” said Zeller. “Because she knew her work would disappear and his would carry on.”

Rebecca pondered that. A strange decision, especially since the commission was hers. Why would she do that? Was she really painting for history?

“She was nobody,” he said. She wanted her work to last, and that was the only way. He used an evocative phrase. He said Oei was “clinging to the wreckage.”

N
obody, was I? Clinging to the wreckage, was I?

This was how the dealer saw me. It had nothing to do with him, of course. An artist trying to stay alive and wanting to be seen “in her own right,” as people so loved to say. It was in another country, and besides the wench was dead. Marlowe, not Shakespeare, but close. If I had hoped to find a clear villain by sending Rebecca on this chase I was going to be disappointed. Everyone was just going along with the moment, doing his job, catching the wave. Some had no clue. Others were quite aware that an injustice was being done. But innocence or guilt was never the question. It was the story I wanted, the how and the why. Here was a painting that could prove a lot: a record existed of the commission and the payment. It was four years after Hokusai’s death; it was clearly my work.

Rebecca changed the subject. “Do you think he drank?” she said. “Why was he so poor, with all the work they did?”

“I think they both drank. I think he pissed his money up a wall,” he said. “Gambled? Gave it to his no-good grandson? All of it.”