The Ghost Brush (84 page)

“There you have it,” she said. “Izn it?”

Someone again asked for more cold water from the bucket boy.

“No! No cold!” I said. I wanted it as hot as Shino did. Soon I would get out and scrub, then get back in again, one layer smaller. Shino too was nearly ready. Her face had become pink. Her skin had plumped out: maybe she was blushing; maybe it was the hot water.

“I think you care for him!” I suddenly accused. “That blind potato.”

“But why do you hate him?” she said at the same time.

“Why?” I could list reasons: his hands; the unarticulated, dark shape of him, like some huge sloth leading with his nose, picking up her scent from his position amongst the window shoppers; his low, insinuating voice; the doggedness of his attentions.

“Blindness is an affliction,” Shino said righteously.

“Oh, and must we love him for it?”

“We must not despise him for it.” She turned her back and climbed out, modestly making her way to her scrubbing towel. The rinsing boy was ready for her back. I listened to the talk. It had turned from mothers-in-law to hairstyles.

“I had it done by someone new; it’s not quite the same,” worried the first woman.

“What happened to the girl you liked so much?”

“She went back home to the provinces, I heard. Her father is ill.”

“It’s always like that when you find a good one!”

I had to get out. When I did, I turned around and was right in front of Shino, who was cooled and rinsed and now returning.

“By the way,” said Shino, “he has a name.”

“I don’t want to know it.”

A
s always when I was clean, my clothes felt old, and I could detect their smell. I suddenly hated being poor. I had to be proud and not feel it. I had to be more noble than my mother. But I wanted to weep. I sulked and scuffed; I looked everywhere but at Shino. I said nothing, punishing her, until we turned the corner near our house. Then what I had been thinking came out of my mouth.

“Does my father know?”

“It is what he hopes for.”

That was too much. I went cold, as if that rinsing boy had doused me right there, out in the open, fully dressed. “No,” I shouted, there in the street. “You ask me a question: Could I be happy for you? The answer is no! I could not. If you marry him, it will be nothing but another form of slavery. You know it!” I hated Shino then. She was too proud to say to me that she was poor, that she had to survive. I would have scorned her if she did.

At the studio door the cats called to me and switched their tails with vehemence: no one had fed them. I put my foot under the male’s belly and lifted him. I ran my palm along his bony spine and then tossed him away. He prowled the edges of the room until someone’s elbow struck him and spilt an ink bowl. The cat hissed; Tatsu picked him up. He drooped on either side of her hands, his feet splayed in protest. She slid open the screen and threw him outside.

I watched my sisters—innocent of this whole life with Shino. I heard my mother amongst the cooking pots outside. She was a crash-and-burn cook, and a messy one. Hokusai sat like a happy, wiry Buddha in the centre of all this, entranced with something that was flying off the end of his brush—a goddess emerging from clouds.

I saw clearly in my rage. We worked, and he created. He alone was happy. And I—oh, lucky me—was his favourite. The one assigned to my father. My sisters felt that, and it made them dislike me. But they didn’t know what it was like. I had no one but him. And he was changeable and, when he wanted to be, a mystery.

It was a burden to be his chosen one. My mother knew about Shino, but my sisters didn’t. Hokusai’s friends and the Yoshiwara people knew about Shino. I saw them together. It made me an outsider where I should have been an insider. This was my family. But as I folded my legs to sit on the floor beside a cold-shouldered Tatsu, it did not feel like it. He had taken away my family and made me his alone.

And now he would allow his beloved Shino to be taken by the blind moneylender. This made me see his ugly side. As if it weren’t bad enough to have all of us propping him up—and him with a courtesan—now he would let the courtesan be sold off because he couldn’t afford to keep her.

How did Shino and my father see each other? I had no idea, but I was certain they did. Did my father keep another room? Was that one of the ways he spent his money? Did they go, the two of them, to even lower-class brothels so the blind man did not find them? How had they come to the decision that lack of money would separate them, that Shino must be sold once more? “It is what he hopes for,” Shino had said.

So they had spoken of it. Yes, marry the blind man, he must have said. I can’t take you. Here is your lucky chance. A new life any broken-down prostitute would be grateful for. Was that what she was? The elegant, fierce, always patient Shino?

I hated Hokusai then. Why had I been given to him? To him and his lover, who did not even really belong to him? Why didn’t my mother want me? I didn’t want her either, that was true—but hadn’t her rejection come first? My father chose me to help in his studio. Did he ever love me? Or did he just need help? Nothing really lasted with Hokusai. Everything was shed, everything changed; he moved past. It all went in the service of his great passion, this making of pictures, this making of fame. His brush he jealously guarded. And mine too: I could see him laying his hand on my work. It was my duty as a girl to help my father; it was our duty as a family to uphold this man’s little kingdom. Which he mismanaged.

Here was one thing I had in common with my sisters, then: we were broken by his ambition and tied to his work. I must try to love them, I thought. How would they escape but to marry another of these men who eat people’s lives?

I drew a series of round, fat stomachs of men and the ripples of flesh over their ribs—one of my father’s specialties. “The best mother in the Yoshiwara,” they called him. He reached his brush over the edge of his desk down to my level and corrected a line. I wanted to cry. I remembered Shino’s instructions and tried to arrange my face in a pleasing manner. I was never successful. Still less, today. I thought, not for the first time and not for the last, If I have to be different, then I will be different. Not like my sisters—willing to marry. And not like my mother, bleating about how it was impossible for her to get what she wanted. That went without saying. Now I thought, Not like my father either. He was a bad father and a bad lover.

Shino and the blind man would marry. If no other way was found. It couldn’t be helped. But not me. I saw what came for women, and it was not going to come for me. I could avoid it; I could be an artist. As for the love of a man for a woman, in my parents’ marriage it had brought suffering. That was obvious. But with Shino there had been devotion and a measure of joy: I had seen it. It was not legal, and it was not to be bought and paid for, but it existed along the canals and in the dark corners of the teahouses, under the lacquer trees—it was an outside love, an outlaw thing. I would be loyal to that. I believed in it, even if they didn’t.

Crazy, I suppose.

I looked at the line he had put with his brush on my paper.

Much better than my own.

I studied it. My father could still give me something precious. He could teach me to paint. To learn from him, I did not have to believe he was a good man or a fair man. I had talent. I would get what I needed, and then perhaps I could escape.

20

Sanba

SHIKITEI SANBA CAME TO THE NORTH STAR STUDIO
.

I was near the door as usual, the gorgon at the gate. Hokusai waved his hands amongst the students, intense, comical bald head gleaming in the lamps that lit the dim space. We had moved by then to rooms near Ryogoku. A huge fire had ravaged miles and miles of Shitamachi terrace houses the year before. Our tenement went up in flames, and many pictures went with it. But new shanties, papered with the wrapping from sake barrels because wood was in short supply, grew like mushrooms. They had the advantage of being clean, at least when we moved in. Now a student lived with us. Our pots of paint, our menagerie of restless caged animals about to be drawn, our stacks of paper covered the floor. Cats, made homeless by the fire, circled outside. I tossed our food wrappers their way, and they licked up anything with the smell of fish.

Sanba bowed low to speak to me. Could he come in?

He was that man who spoke to me at the poetry parties. Parodist, drama critic, and seller of face cream.

“Have you come to sign up for painting lessons? Or to see my father’s work?”

“Perhaps I have come to see you.”

“I doubt that.”

“Can you show me some paintings?” he said, bowing again. “What is your name again?”

“My name is O-ooo-ei.” I made the sound that meant “Hey, you!” I had begun to prefer it to my real name. Its street sound matched my raspy voice.

I sounded like a frog in a stagnant pond, my father said. It was part of my general unattractiveness. Did someone once put a hand around my throat and try to squeeze the life out of me? I don’t remember. Shino had tried to teach me to sing, and in singing, to let go of the screams that I never let out, she said. She coaxed my natural voice to emerge. Not much better. It was low and brown, like the chestnut paste the confectioner squeezes out of his paper cones to make little pancakes. At least I would never sing along with the high-pitched women in their baby tones.

But Shino was not in my life now. I had not seen her since the day she took me to the bath. At fifteen, I was the rasping cricket.

And here was Sanba, leaning over me.

“What is it you are working on so furiously?” he said.

“At the moment, I am writing accounts,” I said.

My father was teaching me to read and write the way men did. Women learned a less complicated set of characters because they had such limited free time. It took years to acquire the educated script. I liked it; it was convenient for him that I did, because that way I could keep track of what we were owed. What we owed, more often.

It was fun learning the characters. We had games to speed us along. Two sailboats made the number five, and pine trees made the character for “jewel.” Each line of the numbers two, three, four, six, and seven was part of a drawing. A mouse sitting on a jewel for the God of Plenty, and flying bats. Nothing was wasted. I learned the character for “mirror maker” by tracing my father’s drawing of a chubby, cheerful fellow whose rounded head and shoulders and thighs made a triangle as he sat on the floor with his wire brush, rubbing the surface to make it reflect. Hokusai had told me how, when he was apprenticed to a mirror polisher, he could never look the ladies and lords in the face. So he peered into the mirrors and saw them over his shoulder, and they never knew he was staring at them.

“I am very sorry to disturb you then, Ooooei. O-oei? That is not a name,” said Sanba. “That is a call. Like a bird call.”

“It is what my father calls me,” I said. “It is easiest.”

“And when he calls, do you come?” said Sanba. I think he must have seen the evil humour lurking under my disguise as faithful servant-girl.

“If I did, he would not have to call me so often, would he?” I said.

He laughed.

“And then I would have another name, wouldn’t I?”

“I wonder what it would be.”

“Ago-Ago is another he uses.” I saw him examining my knobby chin. I thrust it forward.

“A sign of strength,” he pronounced. “You haven’t said if you remember me.”

“I remember,” I admitted.

“I am looking for someone to illustrate my books.”

“You know his work,” I said.

“Yes, but I want to see some.”

I was beginning to think this was a fishing expedition. But I pushed my account book behind me and we picked our way to a corner of the workshop. I knew exactly which pile I wanted to penetrate.

I pulled out Hokusai’s designs, laying them carefully one by one on the floor, then lifting each one and putting it away after he had seen it. Here was the boat harlot: he still hadn’t sold this one. She was curled up in the stern with her head wrapped in black and her arms tucked inside a blanket. You could feel the cold and wet. She looked like Shino—who would never behave that way—but then, all his women did. I showed him a couple of night views of Edo.

“These are nice,” I said grudgingly.

“Tell me what you like about them.”

“Oh, well, the designs and the colours,” I said. “But mostly I am happy for the lies they tell.”

“Lies!” Sanba laughed. “Surely not.”

“That’s what they’re for, isn’t it? For instance, when the painters make scenes of night they show it as if you could see everything. But really you can’t see everything in the night, because it’s dark. So that is a lie.”

“That’s not a lie,” said Sanba.

“What is it, then?”

“A technique.”

“Just as I said.”

“You’re very absolutist for one so young.”

I didn’t like to be argued with. I flipped through the pictures with my fingers. “You don’t think so? Look. In the picture of the netsuke workshop, he shows all women working. That is not true. Only men work there. But men are not so interesting to look at for the people who buy prints. So he makes women in those jobs.”