The Ghost Brush (92 page)

I was supposed to be grateful to Tomei for having me. But I dismissed him with a short expulsion of breath in the top of my mouth: “Ugh!” He brought me tea: “Ugh!” It was cold. He put brush to paper: “Ugh!” There was too much ink.

Nothing disturbed his good humour. He smiled, taking his eyes off the page and letting the ink spread out from the tip of the brush.

“Now you’ve ruined it.”

He tried to kiss me when I was annoyed. Whereas I wanted to kiss him only when he was cold to me, and he never was.

“Come, let’s go out to eat eel,” he would say. “I have money today. We can walk along the riverbank.”

My shoulders rose and I bit my lip. “You’re bothering me. Can’t you see I’m working?”

It was not his fault: it was only that he was not Sanba. He didn’t know about Sanba, but he ought to have. People did. He didn’t pick up clues from my experienced behaviour on the futon. But he was a child, a dreamer.

To add to my crimes, then, I made him a fool. I knew that. Some days I couldn’t look at him. His delight with a piece of watermelon, the sticky, sweet water running down his chin—I had been that innocent before. The way he clapped palms with the man who sold divining poems written on little bits of paper. And that sheepish laugh, huh huh huh, his shoulders lifting as if they were strung up.

He was sympathetic to awkward children. He would spend an hour over sandals with a broken sole. “Throw them out!” I’d say. “I don’t know why you became an artist at all,” I said, standing beside him one day as he knelt on the road, picking up coals from the remains of a cooking fire that had been kicked over. “You aren’t really interested in art.” How had I become so stern? “You’re only interested in broken things,” I said in disgust.

“I am interested in broken things,” he said. He smiled and I thought, He’s going to say it’s why he likes me! “But you are not broken, my pumpkin. You are strong and whole.”

He had read my mind. Unforgivable. I made a face.

He kissed me. He loved me! Why? Why? I wanted Sanba, but Sanba was dead. In a candid moment I told Tomei that the way to get my love was to be cold. Mock me. “Only boil in secret and in the dark,” I instructed.

But he boiled at low temperature, in no time and without shame. And then he boiled over. He tried to make me “vanish,” the term we used in shunga for climax. Nothing. “It is not your fault,” I told him, taking pity. He fell away from me. I was a bad clam, the one in the broth whose shell would not open.

I wanted to extinguish his love for me.

Of course, when you truly want that, you will finally get it. After a time Tomei smiled less on me. I was killing his love. Immediately I regretted it. “Don’t give up on me,” I would whisper to him after he fell asleep. “I’m trying.”

T
HEN CAME THE TIME
when the public did not want Hokusai’s pictures. He had a bad year, and another bad year: all those years were bad. Troubles came to us and stayed. Have I enumerated the deaths in my family? The first was my father’s son by his first wife; he, who like my father himself had been adopted by the Nakajima family, who were possibly his blood relatives, to be heir to the mirror-polishing business. But unlike my father, my brother had made a success of it. When he died, with him died the sum of money we got every year from his employer.

My sister O-Miyo, married to the drinker and gambler Shigenobu, finally ran for her life to the divorce temple. She returned with her son to live with the family. The boy was trouble. She sent him back to his father, but that was not good. His father did not like him either. He roamed the neighbourhood, bullying younger children and the harmless poor. I saw him try to choke the fee collector at the shooting range when he was not even ten. Then O-Miyo developed a wracking cough. She died when she was thirty. The boy was ours. My mother tried but could not control him.

And Tatsu. We watched her fail. I would squat behind her and wrap her chest in my arms to hold her erect while she went into coughing spasms. I tried to pass on the warmth of my heart, my strong spirit. Sometimes blood splattered out. She couldn’t paint then. We missed her work and the way she organized us. The papers went into their former flyaway piles in corners. Her death was a disaster.

Hokumei, too, the merchant-class woman who had brought an air of delicacy and decency into our workshop, had her brief flight of productivity and then left us. I slept at home with my husband but lived from early morning until night at the North Star, where I ran the studio. I had a few students of my own by then. One was Mune, daughter of Hokumei. She became my friend and filled a little of the emptiness my sisters left.

As his women faded away my father stopped laughing. Fellow artists and even disciples seized the opportunity to rise against him. Eisen, whom he had rejected, was now succeeding. Hokusai accused him of taking work that should have been ours. Masayoshi accused Hokusai of being a copycat; a certain former disciple called Dog Hokusai forged our work. I had to write a letter to our Osaka publisher on behalf of Hokusai: “My disciple Taito II is selling his paintings as ‘by Hokusai.’ That is unspeakable. Please make it stop.”

When my father wanted work done under his name, it was by me.

O
ne day I came in to see Hokusai trembling on his side. He flopped his right arm out and shook it. It was loose, like a dead branch.

“How long have you been sitting there?”

His face twisted and his words seemed glued inside him.

“I yam p-pa-ar-lyzed,” he moaned.

It frightened me.

“You are not paralyzed! You’re moving.”

“I caa’an stan up.” He jerked around, trying to get to his feet.

I helped him stand.

“I waaan wal-kit off.”

He began to limp in little circles. I began to giggle. I thought he was clowning. I thought he had simply put his limbs to sleep by sitting.

“You’re paralyzed but you want to walk it off?”

“I’m wal-kit off, wal-kit it off.”

He dragged his legs and his breath was laboured. But he kept going, his face a mask of determination. I watched him. Then I knew. Suddenly he was the old man he had claimed to be since my birth.

“Maa-ke me sit. Sit!”

In those days he did not have a desk to work on. He used the top of a rice caddy. I pushed it in front of him and gave him his brush.

His brush was jerky and rigid. That made him angry. “You do it,” he said. “Liiie tha, no liie tha . . .” He wanted the line of the back thicker; he wanted the curve under the arm thinner. “Liiie tha. Yes. No! No! Noo dry bru stro—”

That was how it began.

W
e thought the palsy might be the end of him. It seemed to go on and on: the great man in this paralytic, spitting, jerking state. He hated being incapable. I was the only one with patience for him. Together we made designs for books of his “famous painting style.” I held his hand while he sketched mountains and trees and fishermen casting their lines into the sea—bald, smiling fishermen basking in the sun.

He told me a legend.

He sketched a bare hill and, behind it, a series of hills with narrow valleys between. “’S a grea’ army through t’ valley. It go-s to co-on-onquer far lands.” He drew the army caught between snow-covered mountains, where nothing but rock, ice, and the small, dark tips of buried trees were seen. The army lost their battles. They even lost their enemy. But the general and his troops pressed on. The general walked. His horse walked beside him, exhausted because the snow was deep.

The general had no advisers left; they had fallen in fatigue. All he had were these rows of mushroom-like men—my father’s arm was improving. He drew each face in the ranks under a shallow straw hat. The army stretched out of sight in the cleft of the farthest valley.

The great warlord was alone in the world. “So h’ asss-k he horse. Unnerstan’?”

“Yes. He asks his horse what to do.”

“Rii-t. ’E says, ‘Ho-oorse, what you think? We go on? Or we go ba-aack?’”

The horse too was old. He had been waiting many years for this question. Now it had come.

The picture grew under my father’s brush. He held his stiff hand with his good hand and drew lines. Each strand of straw on the soldiers’ raincoats and each flagstaff, each rock or treetop protruding through snow, each small disc of hat in that huge army, he drew.

Ahead of the horse were no footprints. Behind him were the general and hundreds on hundreds of men. In his spine and the angle of his head and the way his eyes followed the ground, the horse from my father’s brush expressed his weariness, his resolution, his careful retreat.

The men held their flagpoles high, but the fabric was tattered. Their small feet in black leggings wobbled on the uneven, trodden surface and amongst the footprints of those ahead of them. The warhorse watched the ground in front of him.

“If we go on, we’ll be the conquerors; we’ll be the emperors. We’ll have gold and glory and be celebrated for our bravery.” The general let the reins drop. “Or should we turn back? If we do we reach home again.”

The horse did not have to ponder. It turned and began to plod home, riches and glory of no interest.

“Wha’s vir-tue?” said Hokusai.

“Acceptance of defeat?” I guessed.

He shook his head.

“Fidelity?”

No. This made my father scoff. “N-nnn-no.”

“What is it, then?”

“S-s-ssim-plishty.”

Simplicity.

What was his message to me? That I was the warhorse—there when all else was lost? That I should forgo further battles, and further dreams, and head home? That “simplicity” should be mine—in heart, in art, in thought?

Would he do the same? Was he giving up?

It puzzled me, and I thought about it for many days.

I had no liking for simplicity. Tomei was simple. He reached for me, and when I pulled away from him, he smiled anyway and put his hands behind his head so he could watch me.

“Why are you watching me?”

“I think you are beautiful.”

How could he? I knew I was ugly.

Another symptom of his simplicity was this: he could not see ghosts. That was lucky, because I never lay down with him without the ghost of Sanba alongside. It brought with it his familiar scent of leaves and pine needles, of something half-burned, a wood smell. I suppose it was the scent of Sanba’s quack remedies. I loved it.

My husband was a gem, a genuine fine fellow. He was fond of life and free of anger. He was not conventional: he would have accepted anything I gave him. Yet I had nothing for him but a cruel streak that was entirely new to me.

26

Family

I WENT TO VISIT MY MOTHER
.

Her cheeks had fallen in on her gums. Long-suffering but never silent, she had declined to a garrulous, greedy poverty. There were no riches for her in the artist’s life: she cared for neither prints nor books. She wanted food and warmth, which Hokusai disdained. He became gentle with her, as if she were an old dog.

She was at her sister’s, bundled on a mattress. There had been a crisis. My aunt was crying. The cats were mewling and children stood in corners. My mother had fallen, standing in a crowd at the fishmonger’s. She had to be carried home.

We sent a child for a bonesetter. He put his hands on her and said there was a broken circle in her pelvis.

“It must knit and mend. She must be absolutely still, or it will grow crooked and she will never walk again.”

My father stammered his question: She appeared to be quite dead, but could she come back to life if she wanted?

“Western medicine knows about broken bones. But for broken spirit, the gods of Japan are better,” said the doctor.

“She broke her spirit in a fall at the fishmonger’s?”

“Earlier,” said my aunt.

My mother moved.

“She ’eears us,” said Hokusai. “Sh-she-shee sa-ay she will c-c-c-come ba’.”

“Are you a mind reader now, Old Man?” I said.

“I’m a re-re-ree-ader of faaa-ces.”

“Then what is my mother’s face saying?”

Hokusai hung his head.

“Talk to her. Maybe you can change her mind.”

“I c-c-caan’ t-taalk—”

The gods had taken away his eloquence when he needed it.

I became the translator.

“My father wishes to say, ‘Wife, come back to me. My life will be better with you. I am not ready for you to die,’” I said woodenly.

Hokusai waved his hands. Apparently he did not like my love words.

My brother Sakujiro was there. He had become a solemn young man and adept at accounts, something unusual in our family. Yet humour was in his eyes; he clearly was Hokusai’s son. He alone could tease me. “What would you know about love words, Chin-Chin? You who laughs at her husband?”

“You’d be surprised what I know.”

Hokusai blinked.

“Maybe she is right to want to die,” I said.