The Ghost Brush (13 page)

Then he said, “We’re going out of the city ourselves. As far as Uraga.”

“You know you cannot take her.”

“Why not?”

“No women allowed out of Edo.”

“She’s not a woman. She’s a child.”

“A female child.”

My father looked at me; this idea had not crossed his mind. I was afraid he’d send me back. “I suppose. But she’s my helper.”

“Do you have to get out?” said the bookseller. “Is it so important?”

“Maybe yes, maybe no. Have you seen my new book, about General Disorder?”

The bookseller said nothing more. He led us out the back of the store, crossing the little courtyard to his house. He told us to wait in his tearoom. When he came back, he had a set of boy’s clothes and a pair of scissors.

I screamed when they let down my hair and cut it ragged over my ears and brow. It stuck up from the top of my head like a wiry brush. But I was happy to take off my kimono, which was dirty and binding. The boy’s pants were loose at the knees but narrow at the ankle; the top hung just to my thighs, tying with a sash. I had a coat to go over it. I couldn’t see myself, but my father was laughing and so was the bookseller.

“They’ll never know!”

And they didn’t. When we came to the sentry post that marked the exit of the city, everyone had to stop. My father showed his pass card. The guards looked down from their tower.

“Why are you going out?”

“To see my wife’s mother in Uraga.”

“And this one is?”

We were on the muddy road below them. My father jerked his head in my direction. “My son,” he said. “He’s my apprentice.”

“Pass.”

W
e walked on. I felt curious; the cool air filtered across my scalp. I was light, as if I’d forgotten something. We’d left my girl clothes in the bookstore!

“When will I get them back?” I said. I didn’t miss them much, but I could see people thought I was a funny-looking boy.

“When we go home again, we can stop.”

We passed a drummer with small gongs tied to a belt around his middle. He had spread a mat on the grassy ground beside the road. He was dancing, and as he twisted, tassels with small, hard knots at the ends played a tune on the gongs. He banged on the skin drum in his arms. All the while he had his face fixed on an audience of three who sat on the edge of his mat.

I pulled on my father’s hand and we watched for a bit. Hokusai made a little drawing of the man. We did not throw coins into the small collection that was on the mat.

“Can’t we give him a coin?”

“That would be an insult.”

But I could see the man’s lip turning up. “He wants one.”

“He may want it, but it will demean him to take it,” said Hokusai.

We set out again on the road. I was tired and night was coming. All of a sudden this long walk did not make sense to me.

“Are we fleeing Edo?”

“Never,” he said. “We are quitting it. I’m tired of the city. Everyone there wants money.”

“Is it because you have debts?”

Hokusai was offended. “What do you know about debts?”

“Shino also has debts,” I relayed.

“People pay plenty of money for my work. My work is popular. I sell to the Dutch traders. No, it is not because of debts.”

I chattered on. “Shino has to pay out money she earns to the waiters and for the sake and to the housekeeper.” She didn’t pay the hairdresser because he loved to fix her smooth, endless black locks. I didn’t mention that. “She even has to pay for the makeup she hates. She has to share her money with the other courtesans, and she gives some to the teashop where she meets her clients. And to her family also; she sends some home every month. She even gives some to her husband, who sent her to the chief magistrate,” I said. “That’s why she has debts.”

“Her husband is a wicked man who only wants money now that she is a well-paid courtesan.” He stormed ahead of me in his bowlegged way, fuming. “Why should Shino’s husband get her money?” he muttered as he stomped ahead. “He sold her, in truth.”

We marched along.

“You see, that’s just it. People sell anything. What they love. Their labour. Then they take the money to the next place. Each time it changes hands, the money becomes dirtier. It is an abomination,” he said. “Someone admires my print, they give it a value in this dirty money. I don’t like it,” he said to the road in front of him. “So I don’t pay attention.”

We passed a man with a slow donkey. He stared at my raving father, pitying me.

“How can you not pay attention? We need money. Without it we’ll get debts too.”

“I won’t give coins the courtesy of my attention. I don’t know their names. They are evil spirits.”

He was faking. He did know their names. But his hatred was real. It was another of his ways to be different. Everyone else liked money. Waiters and cleaners picked up coins from the gutters. The courtesans pretended they didn’t see the folded papers that were left by the tea sets. But they were very quick, as soon as eyes were turned, to unfold and count the money.

But I didn’t believe this was why we were leaving Edo.

I ran to catch up. “Is it because you have to hide from the bakufu?”

“Hide? Me?” He snorted with scorn. “You must be crazy.”

That silenced me. I was bad for having angered him. He was moving quickly. But now I stormed ahead.

It was a revelation to be able to move.

In the city we were stopped at every turn. There were crowds you had to dodge. The canals had small, crowded bridges. Our district was closed by a stockade with guards. Locked gates divided neighbourhoods from each other. Every way forward was blocked. You had to dodge and dart.

Now as far as I could see there was open space.

I began to feel the wind.

I set off past women carrying faggots on their backs, fishermen with two baskets over the sides of a horse, pilgrims in white. It was fun to run in boys’ trousers. I imagined that there was a face on the back of my head, and it was making huge and hideous expressions at Hokusai. My eyebrows—the ones on the back of my head—were pinched together. My mouth was stretched into a square, my tongue dangling from the middle of it. My eyes were crossed, the pupils down and in the centre, looking down my nose. I was the villain. When Hokusai peered through the crowds ahead to see where I was, this mask-face would leer back at him. Hah!

But when I looked back, he was gazing off in the distance. Indifferent to my insolence. I was ashamed. I thought of something to frighten myself. It was a habit I had. I learned it from his stories. First the pickled heads. Now I imagined again that he might sell me.

I hung back and found him. “Would you sell me, Father?”

He gave that rattle of scorn he was so good at. He let his lower jaw drop, and he forced the air out so it hissed and stuttered as if it were going up a rusty old pipe. “I would not find a buyer.”

Was I so ugly? So useless? Hadn’t he just said I was his apprentice?

I ran ahead of him again and hid in a clump of pines. I watched him. Hokusai bounced and zigged and zagged along the road. He stopped to sniff the air. He talked to himself, or to absent me. Or to nobody: he needed no excuse to keep talking. He was like a crazy person, it was true. I wished I could run away and not have to follow him. But his voice reached me in my hiding place.

“At the sea we will look outward.” He sounded not at all angry. “It will bring peace.”

His pleasant voice wooed me. I couldn’t leave him. Maybe he could have left me, but I was not prepared to wait and see. I fell in step beside him.

N
ight was falling as we came to a crossroads.

“Will there be money at the fishing village where we are going?” I asked.

My father gave me a stern look.

“I have told you we are leaving the city because of money,” he said. “Would I take you to a place where money is also the god? No, there will be no money.”

“How will we eat?”

“We’ll trade my work for lodging. We’ll take our food from the sea and the earth. We’ll sleep in the homes of your mother’s family.”

We trudged along.

“The Shogun’s men won’t find me in a fisherman’s hut!” he blurted.

Hah! I knew we were fleeing. It was just as Shino had said. But I understood we were not to say so.

“I’m tired of the pleasure quarter anyway. Everyone’s working there. I want to see the other famous places.”

The next post town was ahead. We found an inn where they fed us and let us sleep in exchange for my father making a scroll painting of a Buddha. We went to sleep on clean straw.

11

Barbarians

THE NEXT DAY THE ROAD AHEAD
was just as long. I looked at the people going by on packhorses, but I did not ask my father if we could have one. We moved aside when the
kago
of the rich merchants hove up behind us, carried on the shoulders of men whose eyes and arms bulged. After a long time we sat beside the road. I lay in the grass while my father drew three fat peasant boys running with a kite in the field.

“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. We were inside out.

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 amongst 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 favour 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 red-headed 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.

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 red-headed 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 colours 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-coloured 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.