The Ghost Brush (90 page)

24

Disciples

I WAS NEARLY TWENTY
. Sanba and I walked in the Yoshiwara late one afternoon. It was a festival day, and many people were gawking. But a wall of black clouds started to mass over the low, wooden buildings with their barred windows and unmarked doorways. Rain began. Umbrellas came out—orange, mustard, green, purple—their mounds and spokes sprouting and knocking one another, and water splashing off at angles. Everyone had one but us. We skipped under the eave of the
ageya.
Thunder, a great bang of it, had all the visitors taking to their heels. The rain pelted. The thunder grumbled as if it might move away but then cracked again overhead. Then lightning—I liked to look at it, roaming the sky, snarling, letting out its white, flickering tongue. We stood, inches from the driving water, under the eave.

Between flashes I told Sanba how my father claimed that once, travelling the Tokaido, he had been struck by a bolt of lightning and thrown into a field. He lay there and could not move for a long time. After that he named himself Raijin, after the Thunder God, for a while.

We waited it out, craning our necks and saying “Oh, my” to each bolt. Finally the rumbles and sparks ended. We stepped out. The crowds had vanished. The rain fell sullenly. We ran through the mud puddles to a tiny teahouse.

The teahouse walls, an earthen red, glowed in the lamplight. There were four seats. We squeezed in beside two young lovers. A child-sized woman stood behind a counter. It was low down, set on the earthen floor of an old kitchen that had once been outside the house. Her daughter asked us what we wanted. Sanba ordered matcha, powdered green tea. We revelled in our snug hideaway while outside the rumbling came back, stones rolling across a tin roof. The woman chattered: how loud it was, and how the people had fled. How all the courtesans must have stopped work—it was bad luck to have intercourse during strong winds and great rain. Thunder over lovers could shorten their lives. There was no escaping the Thunder God. The end was coming, so why run? Izn it?

Sanba said that it was true. “The end is always coming, as long as you believe there is one.” This piece of irrefutable logic was lost on the teashop woman, who was truly frightened. He laughed.

I felt the clay teacup against my lips and the inside of my mouth, and the rich, thick pea-green tea. We were snug; we were protected. Wisdom dictated in such a storm to choose a low place and a low attitude where nothing stood up high to challenge the gods, not even your words. Yet here was Sanba showing his disrespect. “You tempt the gods,” I said to him.

“I’m not laughing about the storm,” he said. “I’m laughing at you.”

“Why?” I said.

“Because you are a kind of joke. The gods have made you a great painter, and they have made you a woman too. They have made you better than your father. It is a cruel joke.”

“What are you saying?” I said. The storm rummaged around in the invisible sky above us. “Not better than.”

“If not better, then you might as well not bother,” he said. “Stay at home and get married.” He knew that was repugnant to me. He gave his little cough and smiled cruelly.

More silence within and more rain without. Two slow, very slow, tears worked their way out of my bottom eyelids. I did not blink.

“Perhaps I am wrong,” he continued. “Maybe it’s not a joke but a tragedy. Whatever it is, I won’t be around to see it.” The rainwater ran over the clay tiles and dripped down the wooden pipes beside the house. I could hear it everywhere.

The lovers got up and went out.

The tiny woman with the round face and the tense smile wiped and wiped her counter again. She dried and polished her dishes. Her daughter worked beside her, and finally they stood still, side by side. It was quiet in the sky. The storm was spent.

We walked into the street. The air was a shade of violet. There was no one out. It was a private time. At the long end of the row I saw a woman step tentatively from her house, her umbrella tipped down over her chalky face. She was far down the row of green houses. I stared into that distance. I wiped my face and found it wet. A feeling had just come over me: that my life was like that scene, a fearful, half-hidden thing just visible down a narrow, dark street.

Then the owners came out one by one and lit the big lanterns, and the orbs of light marched one by one down the row; Sanba went one way and I the other. I asked myself again, Why am I different? Why not like other women? Why was I doomed? Was my father the danger?

This was a new thought. My father was my teacher; I honoured him, and I did not resent him. Only when I was angry did those feelings come to me, and then I pushed them away. I was duty-bound to him. I didn’t like Sanba saying my father was bad for me. Perhaps he was jealous of my father’s hold on me. Must my feelings for Sanba conflict with my feelings for Hokusai?

And was I truly a joke of the gods?

H
OKUSAI HAD LITTLE TIME
for the students who came to us. He collected some of them on travels. They lived in Nagoya or Osaka, and they took their classes in the form of letters mailed back and forth. Others became part of our life and our family. He gave their work a cursory glance and passed it to me or Tatsu. Shigenobu, the husband of O-Miyo, wanted to do things his way and had no patience with my father’s commands. He and my father quarrelled and parted, but O-Miyo and her brat still came to us.

A man named Eisen came to the studio then. He was of samurai background. He excelled at Beauties and wasn’t bad at landscapes either. My father did not teach him but gave him tasks, pictures of his own to copy. He did this to all the men, but with Eisen it was somehow worse. He criticized the affable giant loudly about little things: the speed with which he applied his paint; the mannerisms that—to be truthful—all the disciples had. They had to develop personal tics as they tried to follow, but still distinguish themselves from, the master. Hokusai would not allow Eisen to progress. Eisen was decadent, my father said. He drank and kept a brothel. True, I said, but it didn’t stop him from making ravishing pictures of courtesans.

“He must learn to do proper views of bridges and of deities; it’s what we need. We don’t need any more of those Beauties! You can do them, Ei!”

Before long, Eisen left our studio.

A few disciples who reached a high standard were offered, for a fee, a derivation of Hokusai’s name. We had Hokki and Hokko and Hokuen. We had the beautiful Hokumei, a merchant’s daughter. We were for a time a studio of women. There were three daughters and Hokumei. She was ready to submit to my father’s will, or I should say whims. What else could she do? The North Star Studio was the only studio that worked with women. And we daughters had no choice either.

He saw it differently, of course. The Old Man would sit and sigh and draw furious designs, and pass them out to us where we worked, and complain in a light-hearted way that he was outnumbered. “I am your slave,” he would say. “I only work here. You are the boss!” The opposite was true, but this cajoling kept us happy.

I
HADN’T SEEN SANBA FOR WEEKS
and then a
gyoji,
a government worker, came to the studio. He sat alternately chewing on his lower lip and trying to catch the upper mustache in his teeth. I was working on a design for a laughing picture: a servant was ravishing the wife while the husband looked on. Officially banned, of course, it would sell well. The government man watched, his breath hissing in and out. He suspected he was being made a fool of—but it was always so difficult to tell, wasn’t it? Finally he said, “Did you hear that Shikitei Sanba is ill?”

I felt a shock, dull and pointless, as if I had been hit with a rubber mallet. My father kept his eyes on the painting in front of him.

“We have not,” said Hokusai.

“Oh, yes.” The gyoji was happy to share this delicious morsel. “He had a chest cough that would not go away and now . . .”

I knew that small, dry cough. Everyone in the theatre knew it too: it was his stamp and seal. It came at intervals, a measure in his speech, a gesture giving weight to some pronouncement. Surely this little habit was not evidence of sickness. Did the gyoji know Sanba and I were lovers?

“Perhaps he has a cold or flu?”

“Oh, no. It is more than that. He is not expected to live.”

“Who told you that?” I said fiercely. I wanted to trace the information like a rat on the floor and stamp it dead.

“I heard it at Kyoden’s tobacco shop. Mitsu said the doctors told him there is something in his lungs.”

“What doctor? The students of Dutch medicine? Or the Chinese doctor?”

Sanba laughed at the Dutch scholars, their boundless determination to decipher the body, which he considered to be a mystery that should stay a mystery. He believed in instincts; he believed in signs; he believed in crazy medicaments and potions, even those he invented himself.

“The Western doctor came and told him it was too late. He’ll test the worth of his secret of eternal life, won’t he now?” mocked the government man. He raised one of his sharp eyebrows at me and backed out the door.

I remembered the teahouse in the thunderstorm; Sanba had talked about the art I would make. “I won’t be around to see it,” he’d said.

My father was drawing fat men. Fat men squatting, fat men reaching, fat men bathing, fat men dancing. Fat men bubbled in a stream off the end of his brush. Then he stopped and reached over to me, delicately withdrawing my picture of the servant and mistress in jolly congress. He substituted a double page of breaking waves. He had begun it: in the bottom half of the pages, the wave flattened and became relaxed lines of black and grey over the white of the page. In the upper half, the waves were advancing and looked like plumes, the black brush strokes leaving the white of the paper as a blankness that came down with its own power.

“Finish,” he ordered.

Work was like that for me: piecework, factory work. One minute I was draping bosoms, the next making froth on a big rolling wave. I barked out a protest, but it was useless, so I switched my attention to the waves. My tiny movements made black curves higher and higher on the page, matching his, diminishing in size, farther and farther off. There was no horizon; the waves filled the space to the top border. My back began to ache, so I stood and bent sideways. He lifted his head.

“Go, then! You’re not watching, so it’s better that you run off the way you always do.”

That was so unfair I laughed. “Who helps you more than I do, Old Man?”

“No one. I know it. But you are thinking of Sanba.” He pouted.

“I almost believe you’re jealous.”

This was so impertinent it was funny. He smiled his wide, innocent smile.

“Jealous?” he said. “I have three daughters and you’re the last. If Sanba is unwell, I’ll be stuck with you.”

“You’ll be stuck with me anyway. Sanba has a wife.”

“Run and find him,” my father said.

It was raining softly. I took the umbrella and my short kimono jacket and fled to the boat dock. I had no money. But I saw a ferryman we knew and begged a ride north. He jerked his head that I should climb in. The rain stopped and the clouds lifted off the horizon and great squared yellow bars shot sideways from the place where the sun was disappearing.

I sat in the middle, near the flat surface of the river. The prow broke it and the disturbed white undersides of the water folded back like a snarl. The ferryman stood high on the bow while his partner stood on the height of the stern, both with their long poles aloft. The back man pressed his pole down into the river bottom, leaning his whole weight over the end that drove into his sternum. They sang to keep in time: “Stroke! Make way! Stroke! Make way!”

As I travelled north the light sank bit by bit until those low horizontal flares were extinguished. The city was dark and glowering. There were small fires in teahouses along the banks; I saw lanterns lit and hoisted on poles over the shops that faced the water. The ferryman in the bow swayed, the hard bulge of his calf muscle, his bare legs in the cold. In his confidence he hung out wide over the water.

From the water rose that dank smell, and I remembered Sanba’s nearness, an intimate smell that was easy to pick up through his black kimono. His face was always strange to me when we first met, even if we’d been together only the week before. Who is this codger? I would think. When I lay with him, he smiled on me with great sweetness and short-sightedness. His hands were cold. When he looked at my painting, I was nervous. I wanted him to like it.

“You use strong colours,” he had said at first. Grinding pigments had been my job since I was small. I prided myself on the colours I made.

“Bad artists can have strong colours,” I said. “That is of no consequence.”

“It is. Colours count for a great deal. And you are not a bad artist. You may be a great one, and it will be a terror for us all,” he said. “You also have a good teacher.” I nodded. “But you must defeat him.”

Twice he had told me I must overcome my father. “Then,” he said, “we will all see your powers, and we’ll shake in our sandals.”

“Do you mean artists will fear me?”

“Already, already we do,” he laughed.