The Ghost Brush (122 page)

—Patricia Fister,

Japanese Women Artists,
1600–1900
, (Harper & Row,
1988
)

Two letters written by Oei are kept in Obuse in the collection of Koyama Hirofumi, the owner of Kokuhei Miso Factory. The letters are the only artifacts that she left behind.

—Kubota Kazuhiro,

“
Oei Eijo: The Whereabouts of Katsushika Hokusai’s Daughter,
” (
Ukiyo-e Geijutsu, vol.
117, 1989)

R
ebecca had become rather fond of this last and singular researcher, Kubota Kazuhiro. She sensed in his careful phrases determination and authority. He had done the reading. He had been in the archives. He didn’t dodge the issues, like the other academics who have written about Oei and Hokusai. He kept looking. And he kept finding things. He seemed to have a slow-burning passion to assert this woman’s creative claim. He was not eminent, but he had the great advantage of still being alive. He was employed at the Takai Kozan Museum in Obuse, in the mountains of Nagano, where the aged master and his daughter had taken refuge.

And he spoke of the only artifacts she left behind. In Obuse. In the miso factory, for God’s sake.

I
T WAS TIME TO GO TO JAPAN
. Rebecca wrote to John Carpenter for introductions. Kubota Kazuhiro was his friend: Rebecca had suspected he was the reticent fellow in Japan Carpenter had referred to. But she was wrong.Kubota was that man’s former student. Carpenter wrote on her behalf. Yusuke also wrote for her.

And then everyone waited. A few days, a week, and then several weeks.

No answer came.

Rebecca asked Yusuke to write again. Grumble, grumble, but he did.

Then, suddenly, news came. Wrote Yusuke:

I am overwhelmed by the prompt, elaborate, friendly five-thousand-character response from Kubota-san. He deleted our first message because he thought it was spam. You are now welcome to meet with him, and you can expect help from him. He has many things to tell.

She booked her ticket.

F
ROM HER HOTEL WINDOW
high over Tokyo Bay, Rebecca could see a Ferris wheel. In this city so relentlessly and gleamingly of the present, the nostalgic wheel, rimmed with coloured lights, spun slowly in the dark. It was
4
a.m. and Rebecca was awake.

She wished its little buckets could raise the dead souls of Edo.

They couldn’t, of course.

Still, the Ferris wheel made a good image of hell, where Hokusai had always joked that he was going. It was out somewhere in the water, on an island made of landfill, lifting and dropping, dipping towards earth but not digging in, perpetual and detached.

What do you do at
4
a.m. when you feel like it’s day? She sorted out her purse. How funny. There it was, on her Japan Rail pass, embossed and in foil: The Great Wave off Kanagawa. Hokusai’s image, straight out of old Japan. Oei was there, under the snarling lip of it. Rebecca looked at her city map. She was near the Hamamatsu stop on the JR line. She compared dots on the map to what she could see. Hinode Pier was just below her window. Also down there were several decks of expressways, heading along the water’s edge in both directions.

Beside the expressways, scrawny buildings—four storeys high and sixteen feet wide—stood on the grave of the last two centuries. The firebombed rubble of the Second World War; the bricks of Meiji, collapsed in the earthquake of
1923
; the burnt cinders of temples, of the timber rowhouses and shanties. They were so fragile to begin with.

S
he had rushed around Tokyo taking in museums, Ueno Park, shopping palaces, the fishmarket—all the tourist things. She watched the fabulously dressed young people on the trains that run constantly, rapidly, under the city. It all felt like some elaborate game of style and identity and muffled rebellion. As it was then, but completely new.

Strange mission, looking for a woman painter whose name was “Hey you!”, who almost never signed her work, was briefly famous and then disappeared—
150
years ago. Flourishing Woman, or Miss Tipsy: you could read it either way. Another language, another country, another century away. Am I mad? Rebecca thought. Do I think I will see her walking on the street? In her indigo-striped blue cotton kimono and her wooden clogs, with her head cocked at that extreme angle that said, “You may dismiss me, but at your peril”?

I
WAS NO HELP TO HER
. This was my country, but it was unrecognizable. I was as bewildered as she by that expressway, those spinning lights, these crazy giant buildings. If I spoke with my old townsman’s accent, no one would understand me. Not quite no one—I heard my accent amongst the workers at Tsukiji fishmarket. I lingered there, mouth watering for the tuna bellies and the monkfish liver.

Rebecca took the small ferry from Hinode Pier up the Sumida River. I almost wept: the water was squeezed between a mishmash of towers. I caught the occasional whiff of brine, but more often of diesel. Still wide, the river branched and branched again, undercutting the city. I could see its dark path sliding under the pavement, working its old, snaking passages. I slid in amongst the crowds, tourists mostly, trying to see the old water that had been in my life every day, underfoot, alongside, moving, chucking.

The announcer on the boat pointed out the sights as we made our way upriver. Her voice was piercing and high, like a child’s, like a courtesan’s. So women had not got over talking like that, not even yet! We passed the tidal pond garden, where Shoguns hunted with falcons in the saltwater marshes. Was that where Hokusai and I did our party trick with the live chicken? We went under the many bridges—to the great arch of the Ryogoku.

At Asakusa we descended the ramp of the boat. Rebecca was distracted by the Issey Miyake display in the department store, but when we got out the other door, there was the long aisle of the arcade under cherry blossoms! Just as it used to be—but now the blossoms were plastic. Hawkers sold chestnuts and chicken skewers. “This one. Buy this one,” I urged. Rebecca bought a sweet bun filled with apricot paste. Then she bought another.

We passed through the Kaminari-mon, a gate five times my height. Overhead, squeezed between its vermilion pillars, was the fat red lantern with the strange black characters. Rebecca stopped under it. We used to paint them by lying the huge things on their sides, like beached whales. There was the five-tiered pagoda that used to be so tall, just a tyke amongst the towers now. But how strange—little tenements like the ones Hokusai and I lived in were clustered at its feet.

We went on to the second gate to the temple. It was gold and blue and turquoise. Thick grey smoke rose from the burning incense in a large round drum, darkening the air and making it smell of mysteries. I stepped up to scoop and smooth the smoke over my face.

There were still trees here, protected by their proximity to the sacred. In their shade I heard the holy crows, conducive of long life. There was the drone of the monks and the clunk of the padded mallets marking time. The old well with its stone bucket. Bits of the past reassembled themselves. Here was my life!

And we walked on together, companionably, the two of us, writer and ghost, the bidden and the unbidden, amongst the stone lions and the foxes.

F
OR REBECCA, THEN, IT BEGAN
.

She walked slowly around the temple. Unexpectedly she came across a monument marking the place where Kyoden’s desk had stood. Kyoden—Hokusai’s friend, the tobacconist and satirist. He who put the fish tank at the end of the road into his “historical” novel; he who was interrogated on the White Sands and lost his sense of humour.

What was this? A festival. A dragon went by: the horizontal creature snaked along above a growing crowd, rippling instead of roaring. A wooden cart filled with women in whiteface playing flute and samisen followed it.

The temple itself was dark red, with metal strapping on its giant wooden doors. Its high, high ceilings had curved wooden beams at the corners. Great gashes of daylight came through the open spaces on the walls, but it was dark here, clammy. There were rows and rows—hundreds—of small lanterns, each making a small round glow. People were tying paper wishes onto strings and throwing coins into a grate. They lit candles to the Buddha.

She looked for the remains of the Yoshiwara, finding nothing but a few sad little blocks beyond the temple crowded with “soaplands” that were really brothels.

She came across a women’s temple. The sign told her that women came here to express gratitude by bringing used sewing needles and sticking them into tofu.

Something told her that Oei would have been more inclined to eat the tofu.

She headed back to the plastic blossom–covered passageway where the food stalls were. Here Oei would have sat, selling her keshi ningyo dolls, she thought. She stopped, sensing the presence of the ghost, as she had become accustomed to doing.

Together they began to walk through the archway again, away from Asakusa, towards the pier. They’d lingered too late in the afternoon. The market was clogged with people. They came at Rebecca, face after face, an army of the present day. She shifted to the right, she shifted to the left; she could not walk in a straight line or keep any momentum. She had to slow right down. Shuffle along with everyone else.

And in that crush, she lost the ghost.

She knew it instantly.

Oei was gone. No presence, nothing.

Rebecca went back down the Sumida at
3
p.m. on the same boat, under the succession of bridges. The sun had come out. There was a slight haze of pink that predicted cherry blossoms to come. The river was bright silver, rippling, churning. The watery side passageways were dark compared to the sunlit width of the main passage. It was beautiful. But empty.

S
HE NEEDED TO DOWNSIZE
. She couldn’t take her big clunker of a suitcase all over the country on Japan Rail. The night clerks at the hotel put her in a taxi to the Don Kihote discount store to get a cheap smaller suitcase. Rebecca at first didn’t understand the reference, but when she saw the store sign she laughed: wonderful that the old jouster at windmills should live on here.

Coming out into the dark pulling her three-thousand-yen purchase she stopped, stunned. There was Mt. Fuji in the distance, where it had never been before. White, perfect, gleaming. How was it suddenly visible? Was she on a height of land? What vista had that short taxi ride opened? She could see why the people of Edo worshipped Mt. Fuji. The mountain popped up as if it were alive.

Maybe old Edo was reaching out to her again. She crossed the street to a warm, lit noodle shop and slid onto a stool at the counter. Face slick from the steam from his pots, cotton scarf tied around his forehead, the cook sent out his greeting. A woman worked the counter as if it were her concert piano, her flying fingers wiping it, bringing chopsticks and warm cloths, placing bowls, removing bowls. Salarymen were hunched along it, solemn over their bowls.

It was an expensive district but an old one, near the river. Outside the tall hotel across the street were cars with drivers, waiting. Two girls, their split-toed white tabi flashing over high geta, their kimono fishtailing, wore the thick, conspiratorial whiteface of prostitutes. A man got out of a limo with a wide-shouldered swagger. She could feel his sense of entitlement, like a slap in the face.

The ghost was showing her, wasn’t she? It was like a moment in her world. The arrogance. The secrecy. How many times did Oei turn her face, drop her chin, not to confront? How many times did she slink by in the cold while another woman, her features obliterated, was purchased? Rebecca felt the savagery of Oei’s contempt, how she spat it out in loopy drawings on sake nights, scorning the cold of winter.

T
HE NEXT MORNING REBECCA
got the
6
:
30
train from Ueno station to Nagano. In Nagano she got on a slow commuter for Obuse. Kids in school uniforms rode with her, staring. At
9
:
15
she arrived.

Kubota Kazuhiro looked nervous as he faced the odd arrival of the lady writer. He was a youngish man, round-faced, with a dark thatch of black hair cut across the middle of his forehead. He was sombre, polite, wordless.

Rebecca tripped along beside him, smiling uselessly as he took charge of her bags. The town was flat. There was a rim of mountains on the horizon, like white teeth. The sky was blue. Rebecca had thought, from his writing, that Kubota-san could feel Oei in the air, as she did. “According to the words that have been passed on in Obuse,” he wrote in his article. In Toronto—even in Tokyo—that sounded unlikely. Words passed on for
150
years? But Obuse was different. Rebecca could see it instantly. Mountains hemmed them in, and on the plain, canals crossed the tidy orchards as they must have done hundreds of years ago. Maybe. Yes, such collective memory was possible in a small town where people took up ancestral vocations, where they lived in the same houses for centuries.