The Ghost Brush (55 page)

“Ah, Sakujiro. How does it go with you?”

I was genuinely happy to see him. I had heard nothing since I had left his home. The earthquake was two weeks ago. I was worried about Tachi. “Is everyone well?”

He told me his wife and family were well but his house was badly damaged. His garden bench had broken in two pieces, just where I had sat on it. No doubt the wife saw meaning in that.

“First the cholera kills so many,” he said, “then the earthquake. There are seven thousand dead. All the carpenters are building coffins. It will be a long time before we can rebuild.”

“I am sorry,” I said. I truly was. But the satirical mood was too strong to resist. “But I am sure the deaths from sickness and disaster were not intended as a personal inconvenience to you.”

Sakujiro curled his lip.

“In the tenements we can rebuild by ourselves. But your magnificent structures cost a great deal more to replace, and you have to pay the poor to do the labour. Your accounts must tell you that.”

He shook his finger in my face. “You speak without caution. Your words are like acid!”

But their truthfulness shot me full of energy. My words gave me back just a little of that which had been denied me. I know I should have dissembled. Could he understand why I spoke as I did? I did not even try to explain. Perhaps I should have. Instead I held out my arms to him. “Do you dislike your sister, or only disapprove of her?” I said.

“I disapprove of artists who disrespect our regime!”

“It was your father’s way,” I snapped. “He would have disapproved of you for being too respectable!”

“That is a filthy lie! My father was not political. He knew how to stay alive, even if you don’t.”

“And who, then, should speak for the afflicted ones?”

“Why, no one, of course.” He stared at me. “The Shogun is their father. He speaks for them. Or are you one of those who favour the return of the Emperor?”

He walked around me, turned his back, and walked away, crossing the narrow back street. Then he turned back towards me and narrowed his eyes, as if removing my surroundings from the picture helped him see me. I was shocked at the next words.

“You are bitter,” he announced, “because we have money and you do not.”

We had been making progress as friends. I didn’t want to fight. I tried to mollify him.

“Let us be agreed. Money is not the cause of this dispute,” I said. “There is cause to celebrate. The earthquakes are over. They were terrible, but they signalled the change our father waited for his entire life. I don’t normally believe in signs, but to peasants like Hokusai—”

This incensed Sakujiro. “Peasant! His mother was a descendant of Lord Kira.”

I pointed to the door sign still hanging on the collapsed beam. “A peasant of Honjo,” it said.

His face turned red. “Hokusai was not above laying claim to his noble ancestry either, when it suited him. You are the peasant, you . . .”

I rocked back on my stoop and blew the tobacco smoke out of the side of my mouth. If I was to be an old hag in an alley, then I would play the part.

He went on. “You say you have no money, but I wonder. Everyone knows that Hokusai commanded enormous sums for his work.”

“Oh, that old story! I am surprised that the son of Hokusai cannot be more original.”

I reached for Sakujiro as if to embrace him, though I would never. “I wish my father had been more prudent with his cash, but as you know yourself, it was not possible to teach him good habits. Please, Brother, may I give you some tea? Let me call the boy—”

But Sakujiro was too far gone in his anger to respond.

“And why don’t you make tea like any normal woman?”

I was stung.

“Why must we fight about our father?” I knew the answer. It was not who he was, but whom he loved. “Brother,” I said, “you came first for him. You were the son. He was not able to show it. But that is how he felt.” It was a lie, but an easy one.

Sakujiro drew breath. “I have not come to fight with you. I have come once again to warn you. You must leave this place. It is dangerous. You are old.”

What was this word they bludgeoned me with? “Old”? Old was not me, not yet, not by twenty years. I was not even sixty. At sixty my father had worn red and called himself “one again,” Iitsu. At sixty he had his best work yet to come.

“This is a safe place,” I protested. “Alcock”—I said the English word slowly and carefully and watched to see that it impressed him—“the British ambassador walks out from his house and around the market, buying pictures and toys. I sold him a set of keshi ningyo dolls . . . And you are wrong that I am old. I rise every morning and chant. I am quick and ready. I am less old today than I was when Hokusai died,” I said.

“This place,” he said very slowly, “has fallen down around your feet. There has been disaster after disaster. And you are without defence.”

It angered me greatly to hear him say it. But this time I dissembled.

“Of course I must listen to you, as the oldest male,” I murmured. “But I don’t understand. If I do not stay here, where will I go?”

“You know where. To Uraga.”

“We tried that already.”

He looked miserable. “I cannot leave you here. My conscience will not allow it.”

“And you cannot take me with you. Your wife will not allow it.”

Finally there was a tiny smile on his face.

And I saw that he did love me, my brother. He loved me as duty would have him love me, although he hated me for what I was.

“Give up your feeble-minded revolutionary glee at this misfortune! It is not a sign! There are no signs. There are no portents. There is no grand story where the downtrodden city-dwellers come out the victors. Our time is a string of accidents, and only the Shogun can protect us.”

He spoke as if he alone knew what was to come.

“There will be accidents, disease, and corruption. There will be chaos. Do not be buried in it. If the next cholera epidemic doesn’t kill you, the censors will root you out. Or the anti-foreigner forces will find you.”

“I want to live as long as Hokusai. A diviner told me that I had at least twelve years of life left.” Suddenly it seemed like quite a few.

He struck his forehead with the heel of his hand. “Stubborn, stubborn, primitive. It’s true our father lived a long time. But these are terrible times. And how did Hokusai survive anyway? Everyone knows. He had you to look after him.”

Tears came to my eyes. No one before, other than Shino, had acknowledged that my care of Hokusai had propelled him to his great age, that this “miracle” had been made at least in part because of my labour. Why, then, should I have only one dozen years more? Unfair! Unfair!

Sakujiro too was shaking with emotion. He touched my hand.

“The world is topsy-turvy. The world is going mad. Uraga was a refuge for our father. It can be one for you,” he said.

I
went to the temple and prayed. Was Sakujiro right? Must I leave Edo? What did the deities think? Was Sakujiro simply jealous of my freedom? No, at heart he was decent. I knew that my brother was right: I could not stay any longer in the tenement.

I had the idea, kneeling there, that I could please him and myself too. I remembered Katsushika Isai’s offer. The disciples were gathering in Yokohama. His shop was selling prints to foreigners, and not only that, the newspapers so favoured by foreigners needed pictures. Should I try Yokohama, heart of the foreign invasion? The heart of the new export enterprise of the Hokusai disciples?

Then a strange thing happened. As I was backing away from the little shrine, a nun approached. I would have passed her by, but she stopped me.

“You are Katsushika Oei, the painter of birds and flowers and cats?”

I could see that she referred to my peaceful respite in the old temple in the hills above Kyoto.

“I am.” I bowed and we both raised our heads to look in each other’s eyes. I recognized her then as one of the nuns who had practised her devotions in that place. I grasped her hands. Tears welled in my eyes at the memory of that time of retreat.

“Did you know that our little old temple by the monkey tree was broken up?” she said. “We have all been moved to different cities.”

I had comforted myself with the idea of Shino there. I was startled, and heavy-hearted.

“Where has Shino been sent, then?”

The nun gripped my hands tighter, lifted and lowered them in happiness. “But of course you haven’t heard.”

I hadn’t. If anyone had wished to reach me, they couldn’t; since my father’s death I had moved from place to place and left no traces.

“I pray it is not bad news.”

“Oh, no. Something wonderful. It seems”—here the nun pulled us closer together (even nuns are prone to gossip, but when they do they try their utmost to disguise the fact)—“it seems she is the daughter of an exalted family.”

“Ah.” I knew that.

“The imperial women came to find her. She has been made the abbess at the Temple of Refuge.”

I stammered my thanks and left the temple quickly. I was in a rush to be gone. I sat a long time by the bridgeposts with Yasayuke. I thought of the diviner’s words, a prediction that meant I had only a handful of years left. It had been weeks since the earthquake, and now as we watched the guards removed the barrier.

It was another sign. It was time to leave Edo.

45

Poultry Lane

YOKOHAMA WAS A SCRAMBLING
, low place with dirty water running between the streets, and sailors from all nations drinking, and sad little brothels. Katsushika Isai gave me a room in an inn a few doors up from his printshop in Poultry Lane. He was the last of the ukiyo-e artists. A bout of cholera had taken my old friend and rival Hiroshige away. He was in his sixty-second year. He was buried in the inner garden of the Togaku-ji temple, Asakusa, beside a little pond, and his grave marked by a stone flanked by palm trees. I knew the place. He was three years older than me. Isai had a workroom in his shop. There I drew designs for woodcut prints, while old Egawa sat behind with his tools and carved the blocks. We made prints with bright colours featuring Western men and women, and showing all the changes in Japan. I did not sign them. We made our own seal for the shop.

I was pleased. I had found a way to go on. Isai was not my only customer either. I sometimes made pictures for the English newspapers, when the editor came to ask. And occasionally one of our old patrons gave me a commission. It was not the way it had been, however, when we could go and live there for months, taking our time. All that was over.

I bought food now to eat at the little table in my room: squares of tofu and bamboo shoots and cuttlefish and sweetened duck with taro. I bought my favourite miso-smeared cucumbers and white radish with its black-green wilted top leaves, the tiny fish grilled golden brown on skewers, and sour plums from the market. I spent hours window-shopping, like the careless girl I never was. The foreigners walked the wooden sidewalks with their heavy square-toed shoes. They brought their women too. They shouted and hailed one another across the mud-filled streets. They haggled for prices and carted off barrels and barrels of anything that could be bought.

In the bookshops there were dictionaries for barbarians with pictures of what our words meant, and other dictionaries so we could learn English. It was there I made a strange discovery. I picked up a little book—An Open Letter to the Japanese, it was called—by Doctor Phillip von Siebold.

The sight of his name shocked my body, drying my throat, striking a hammer in my chest. You would think that I was a silly young courtesan. As my father had so cruelly teased. It had been thirty years. I remembered the intimacy of our talks. And how I longed for my window on the world when he, collector of flowers and insights on the female of the Japanese species, was gone.

The book had been published in Japanese in Nagasaki. It appeared that the exiled traitor von Siebold had been allowed back in the country.

I skimmed his words. Von Siebold said that he had been looking out for the good people of Japan all along, even while he had not been allowed to come here. I could hear his voice in the words. He said he had foreseen our being overtaken by foreign powers. He said it was all happening as he had known it would. China had lost the Opium Wars to Britain and was now forced to trade the drug with the English. We were next. He had tried to warn the Shogun. In a royal letter from the King of Holland he had advised Japan to open itself, rather than be opened by American gunships. But the Shogun did nothing and kept his letter secret. Therefore the bakufu were not prepared and could only capitulate when the Americans arrived.

I read on, amazed that he was allowed to put all this in a book.

Von Siebold explained that the treaties giving Americans free access to our ports were not fair to the Japanese. The price of Japanese silver was too low, and the traders, who were making 200 and 300 percent profits on the goods they bought in Japan and sold in the West, were cheating us.

I bought the book.

At home I examined it thoroughly. There was no picture of Phillip. I wondered if I would recognize the Miracle Doctor. Or he me. I had been young then. Strong-jawed woman. I had grown into that chin, somehow. They said I was old, but I was not ugly, not anymore. I even thought I gave a pleasant impression to those I met. I had not a single wrinkle in my face, but there were streaks of steely grey in my hair where I pulled it back from my forehead. And I had learned to laugh.