The Ghost Brush (63 page)

All those temples and arched wooden bridges and packed theatres and fireworks on the river! It could not have been more different from home. How marvellous for life to be like that, open and public and full of incident! Where she lived, the streets were wide and cold. When they had storms, everyone took refuge in their big, solid houses.

But in Edo, people lived outside in any weather; if they retreated, it was to rooms made of paper. Each person had his proper outfit, his activity—her umbrella, his boiling kettle, his neck yoke of buckets, her satchel losing papers into the river. It was so detailed, and although busy, never rough, but delicate and full of care. No one was forgotten, or idle.

She fell in love with Edo, Japan.

But why? Why this faraway, long-lost place?

Maybe she was an unhappy child, one who loved stories. Who needed stories.

Maybe she felt overwhelmed by the deep banks of Alberta’s huge North Saskatchewan River, the gothic High Level railway bridge, the frigid winters. Her country had been conquered with brute strength, dragged growling from wilderness to suburb in decades. Theirs was aged and harmonious, streaming with ant-like people, but still, in the pictures, magnificent and untamed.

In their pictures, she thought, the people worked the land intimately, traversing it on winding footpaths and picturesque ferries. Maybe she preferred that to the sparse presence of her fellow citizens in their gaping plains and their violent conquest—wide asphalt roads, diesel-spewing tractors, trucks with shovel jaws like dinosaurs.

There was a grimness in her family, a lack of whimsy, an insistence on the practical. What was the use of that? was a common question. Everything had to be worthwhile. Edo’s floating world was the country of her juvenile dreams, her dollhouse. If she could, she would have walked in, sat by the roadside, and consulted its poem diviner—a wandering man with paper fortunes tied on a stick.

But she couldn’t.

Bibi, “the Baby Eagle,” went to school and was popular, and did the things girls did, and married, and forgot about the pictures. When she was twenty-six, she asked everyone she knew to stop with the baby nickname and call her Rebecca. She worked on a typewriter and then on a screen—clicking away with obdurate, fiddly words that had a tendency to lie down and go slack, or pile up together and clash. She took such endless trouble with them! At night, when she didn’t want words, only colours and shapes, she reverted to the ukiyo-e. She leafed through the pages of books and remembered how the pictures comforted her. She frequented museums. She studied catalogues. She looked and looked.

But she wasn’t an expert. And she didn’t collect. No, she just turned the pages and gazed.

T
hank Myoken for small mercies. I hate collectors.

Our pictures were not high art, but they were wide art. They were everywhere. And ephemeral. Published every day and for the moment. It is amazing how many have fluttered down to her time, considering that they were produced on the cheapest paper and sold for less than the cost of a cup of tea. Considering that people used and abused them, passed them around, glued them to the walls of their rooms, which then burned down or were buried in an earthquake. They were argued over in bathhouses, torn in catfights, banned and destroyed. They have lasted, but their meaning has completely changed. In my time they were subversive, a dangerous enemy to the feudal powers; in hers they were escape fantasies and desperate clichés. Is there a sushi shop in the world without blowups of The Great Wave or Utamaro’s courtesans at their toilette on its walls?

Of course, people didn’t know they were courtesans: Rebecca thought they were beautiful rich girls leading lives of luxury—so graceful, so softly formed, with faces so disdainful of feeling. Only later, when she read about the pictures, did she get it: a courtesan was a prostitute. Their moments of languor were breaks from the job. In reality (as my old friends loved to say), they were mistreated, diseased, debt-ridden, and likely to die young.

“
I’m just interested. What about you?” said Rebecca to the teacher.

“Oh, I came for the hell of it. I love Hokusai’s prints; I’ve looked at them over the years, and I just wanted to know more about him.”

Rebecca mentioned that she was a writer. The woman immediately wanted to know what she was going to write, but Rebecca had no idea, and if she had had an idea, she wouldn’t have told her.

Then Rebecca said, “Did you notice Carpenter mentioned the daughter? I know a little about that daughter, Oei. I read about her in a book on Japanese women artists. There’s a famous image, sketched by a student, of Hokusai in his temporary lodgings in his last years. Oei was the funny little woman hunched at her father’s side. I’ve seen a couple of paintings by her too. After his death she disappeared. She just walked off saying she was going to the sea.”

“Oh, really?” said the schoolteacher.

“Yes, really,” said Rebecca. “I almost wanted to say—you know, when they were talking about the disciples and who maybe did the work and how he could have managed at age ninety—does anyone consider the daughter? In the picture there she is, sitting by his side. It seems like a natural question . . .” Rebecca’s voice trailed off.

“You should ask!”

I
n the auditorium after lunch, Rebecca lined up to speak to Professor Carpenter. She didn’t know what she was going to say, but he seemed approachable. He politely dispatched a collector who was sure that the print his aunt had left him was extremely valuable and turned to her.

“I’m interested in Oei,” Rebecca blurted. “But there’s so little written. Can you direct me to some information on her? I understand she painted all her life but left almost no signed works. I’m a novelist,” she added. You never know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing to admit to a stranger.

It wasn’t what he’d been expecting. But his eyes lit up.

“It’s a great story,” he said.

It wasn’t the answer Rebecca had been expecting either. She stepped back and smiled.

“I know why I think it’s a great story, but why do you?” she said.

He said something about Oei being a woman and a better painter than her father—did I hear that?—and living in that terrible time for women.

Rebecca blurted on. She couldn’t stop herself. “People talk about the painting being uneven. About the two very different styles of work. About ‘the studio.’ The disciples. About how mysterious it is. But it’s so obvious! There’s that picture of her sitting beside him. She was always there. I think she was the painter. You can tell. Her line is different, and her colours—”

He jumped in eagerly. “Her palette was completely different,” he said. He was about to say more. And then abruptly he stopped. He buttoned his lip, is what he did.

He asked if she had his latest book, in which there was an essay on Oei. She didn’t, but she’d get it. He also said there was a fellow in Japan who knew a lot about Oei, but he wasn’t saying much.

And then he stopped again. It wasn’t that he was being protective of his information—she could see that he was a generous man. There was something else preventing him from saying more.

A man was waiting.

Rebecca moved off.

I
N THE AFTERNOON MORE TALKS
. A curator from the Tokyo National Museum explained that to mount a proper exhibition, the Japanese would have to borrow from eighteen different museums around the world. Furthermore, works that
were
in Japan had been declared national treasures and could not be displayed for longer than eight weeks.

Therefore this was the first and probably last chance to see the full range of Hokusai’s work in one place. And the truth was, people were scratching their heads. It didn’t add up. The work was uneven. It was hard to decipher. At first the comments were careful.

“We need to delve further into what Hokusai meant by the works he created,” said someone.

“We should look at how the studio functioned, and how involved the students were in production.”

“We need to ask why so many of Hokusai’s works are dated ‘age
88
.’”

It was hot in the room. People were shifting and rattling their papers, ready to go. But Rebecca sat up. She had a journalist’s nose, and it was twitching. Something was happening. The tone was changing. Turbulence below was beginning to break the smooth surface.

She used her old trick of lifting herself out of the debate and listening as if from behind a screen. The language began to shift. There was criticism—of the artist himself or of the exhibit, she wasn’t sure. It became quite pointed, considering the circumspect nature of museum-talk. Her nape tingled; was it cold in the room? No. The language became more direct.

“Some of these paintings from his old age look as if he was drunk.” That was one of the Japanese, speaking through a translator. “No, I forgot”—the Japanese speaker may have been sarcastic, but the translator was deadpan—“he didn’t drink. Maybe he didn’t get much sleep, or wasn’t feeling well when he created them.”

Another man interrupted, defensive. “He did say that the lion works he had passed on to his disciple Mr. Fukawa.”

What disciple? Who was Mr. Fukawa?

The first speaker spoke out, interestingly, for more women in the field.

“It’s time to work on authentication,” said another. Some tones were acid, others placating.

“If authentication takes place, it shouldn’t be seen as a threat. It doesn’t matter if the pictures are authentic or not,” said someone else, a little lamely.

Now that was naive. Would you say the same about Van Gogh? If they were “inauthentic,” would they still be wonderful works? Would they still be worth millions? No. Surely it did, in fact, matter. Were the experts trying to let the Freer Gallery down gently on the fact that some of their Hokusais were not exactly Hokusais?

“It’s important to have a dialogue with the work,” announced a man significantly.

Shocked voices were raised: all the pictures were signed and sealed as Hokusai’s; the works could be defended, each and every one.

C
arpenter spoke last. He attempted to smooth the waters.

He said that he had edited the experts on Hokusai in his early years in the profession, and that he had withheld his own opinion. “I learned to look at certain works with the eyes of others.”

Was he looking in Rebecca’s direction? He was!

He referred to a certain essay, “Labyrinth or Hornets’ Nest.” “It’s very important,” he said. “It must be read.”

Furthermore, because he had studied the calligraphy he could say this: it is possible to make a perfect copy of a calligraphy signature. And a seal, he said, can be used by people other than its owner. It was important to think of others who might be involved. And he did agree with what had been said before: the forgeries—he used this word deliberately—were best in his eighty-eighth year.

“This ought not to diminish our admiration for the painter,” he concluded, in what was surely an anticlimax.

I
T HAD BEEN A LONG DAY
. I’m not sure how many people in the audience actually got the forgery remark. Rebecca did. I did.

And even I—wisp that I was, long gone as I was, listening in from another world as I was—knew it was a big word to use in a huge national art gallery, a big word to use in connection with the most famous Japanese artist outside the shores of Japan.

4

Edo, 1800

I WAS BORN
.

Into the red squall of dawn, the teem of city. Into the vast numbers of townsmen with only one name.

The earth was flat.

The Shogun ruled.

It was a Virtuous Regime, a Benevolent Regime, and there was no unexpected event.

I screamed. And why not? After Miyo and Tatsu, I was Ei, the third daughter of a penniless artist. My father’s first wife, who produced the first two daughters and also one son, was dead. My mother was the second woman to take on the job.

She looked critically at me, first of her children, fourth of his.

“She has large ears,” said my father in a tone of delight. He seized me. “This one is mine!”

My mother was morose. “Large ears are lucky in men. Not in women.”

“She looks like a little dog, a Pekinese,” he said. “And look at this!” He chucked my peculiar outsize chin. “I will call her Ago-Ago.”

Chin-Chin. Another of my flaws was thus pointed out to my mother. She became even more unhappy. I, on the other hand, became defiant and thrust it farther.

“There is self-will in that face,” she said. “It must be broken.”

But my father laughed in amusement and delight. His laugh was like milk to me. He took me in his arms and I was his forever.

It was as if he’d never seen a baby before. He fed me rice water with the tip of his finger. He tied me in a sling and wore me under his ribs, or on his back if he was working. From that day there were two of us, together. We slid through the clamorous throngs of our burgeoning city like carp in weeds. He said I was his good luck charm. He did not break my self-will but made it.