The Ghost Brush (108 page)

“Ei!” he said. “What do you do to me? You are not beautiful. You are not what a woman should be. You are not helping just now to stoke my fires . . . But I want you nonetheless.”

“I’ve heard it all before,” I said. “Until you get to the part about wanting me.”

He gave up with the hearth and turned away. Behind his back, a small orange flame jumped.

“It is the triumph of the intelligence over the merely carnal,” he said. “Was your husband your first? Or do I have some early deflowerer to match?”

“You do.”

He guessed. “Sanba? He was the age of your father, wasn’t he? Well, I am much younger.” He laughed at himself then.

The room was growing warmer.

He came to me and opened my kimono with his hands. He found my undergarment and loosened it. His fingers went down my belly. It was round and solid.

I put one hand behind his neck. He began to bow, his spine curling under my fingers. His mouth, his eyes, and then the top of his head brushed my lips. I pulled the kimono loose from my shoulders and pressed his head to one side. My nipple was standing.

“Where did you learn to do that?” he said.

“I didn’t learn it. It came with desire.”

His head moved over to the other one. “Same thing?”

My kimono settled halfway down my arms and chest, as it was tied around my waist. I had been initiated when I was barely older than a child. But that girl had died with Sanba. Now I was a woman.

“A woman with mass has a certain appeal,” mused Eisen.

He turned me to the back. His hands moved over my shoulders and down my spine, feeling each protruding knob of my backbone. My skin rose to his touch.

I wondered if it was possible to faint from desire. In a play it would be. “Perhaps we are in a play,” I suggested.

“I am,” he said. “I always am.”

He parted my kimono further, over my belly. I reached back to touch his. The belly was coiled as if a hairless beast slept just under the skin. I arched my back and pressed my neck into his chest. He put his lips on my nape and moaned.

“I will lose myself,” he said.

I parted my legs.

T
hat was the beginning of our two-brush production.

Eisen was a tall man. While standing erect, I could rest my head on his chest. With my father gone, he sometimes stayed all night. In the evening after work, he would drink. I had a little sake too. Then he liked to make love. I studied him: his feet, curled with muscle tension as he loomed over me; his face, that fixated stare men get as they approach their climax. He kept his eyes shut. I kept mine open. I examined his member, which I had not had occasion to study before. It was like a salamander, moving blindly with its smooth, wet head.

His thighs were lean and straight, much straighter than the average man’s, or than my father’s, which were bowed. His buttocks were not hard or round, but tucked under, a little wide and smooth. His chest too was smooth, his nipples dark, large, and flat. You had to wonder why he had them. His kimono remained on at all times, as did mine: my room was cold, and the erotic potential of our dress enormous. The soft material sliding away from your skin, opening, letting hot body parts meet.

I was full figured; he was thin. I liked his boniness. I liked his hard shins, his hipbones, and his elbows as they pressed against me, navigating my softness by feel, inching towards where he needed to be. He did not rush once he was there, which made me happy. I liked the pushing, and finally his arched flop; he looked like a fish that has been pulled from the shallows.

He was funny and he was available; we fell into the habit of each other. I was not in love, as I had been with Sanba—as I half thought, sometimes, I had been with the Dutch doctor, whom I had met for only an hour three times, five years earlier. Being in love was a foolish idea, as my father said—a fashion, a swoon courtesans used to distract themselves from the awfulness of their lives.

We shared no dreams or longing. With Eisen it was a coupling of needs with requirements. Freed from the urgency to please the man because I “loved” him, I did what I wanted. This was very different from giving myself, or submitting, or becoming limp and docile in the belief that it fuelled male desire. It was by accident that I found I could enter into a roll upon the mats with a cool head and all my curiosity intact.

“Why don’t you try pressing from the front?” I said when he pursued me at the back door. “Not inside, just outside, like that.”

“You have the tricks of a courtesan,” he grumbled, complying and laughing as he did.

“I know nothing! Nothing! I’m just trying to feel good.”

He told me about women who sat unmoved by men’s attentions, reading books while they were being made love to. But I was the very opposite. It was not disinterest but close attention that he saw in me. I was having ideas for pictures while we were making “love.”

I tried being on top, and he found that entertaining too. “I must make a note,” he mumbled as I let the breast of my kimono open towards his lips. “This is really rather good.”

The kimono with their happy, graphic possibilities heightened the pleasure. It was fun to feel as if I were in the pictures I had designed for so long.

T
ogether, Eisen and I took on a
shunga
commission. The private buyer could afford the fifteen pages of large canvas in four colours. He wanted a silly story under the title
Images of a Couple.
I remembered what I had seen as a small girl. With Shino in the brothel, I’d witnessed people rolling together, men mounting girls, girls’ feet in the air.

We were paid well, and for a time I had plenty to eat. I sent money by messenger to Uraga. We got more commissions then. I found my father’s designs for couples in love positions and began to use them. But my own way of seeing began to appear on the pages. My figures were rounder than Hokusai’s. The world was a fishbowl, and the man—whichever man—was on the outside, looking in. The woman was on the inside, swimming in it, knocking against the glass. Perhaps drowning in it. Their robes ballooned around them.

We made up a story about a courtesan and her client who went out on a date on the Sumida in a small boat with a roof. The man paid a tip to the boatman so he would let them take the boat by themselves while he waited on the pier. Eisen wrote the dialogue. I had to remind him to keep it short.

courtesan: It’s such a nice prow. Give me one more, one more time of nice harpooning.

man: Port the helm! Port the helm!

courtesan: Like this? Like this?

Shortly thereafter, the bakufu outlawed the little covered boats, permitting them only on rainy or snowy days for the purpose of transportation.

We were in the midst of yet more hard times.

W
E SIGNED A BOOK OF
SHUNGA
TOGETHER
. We wrote in large characters on the cover “
In-yo wago gyoku mon ei,
” meaning, “joint work by man and woman.”
Gyoku-mon
means “jewellery.” A woman was a possession, a jewel of our
mon
, our gate, or name. On one page the man and woman were having sex under the heating table
.
I drew a book on the quilt, half-falling off the table. On the top right corner of this painted book, we wrote: “Written by Shishiki Gankou and Josei Insui.”

Shishiki Gankou was one of my father’s names, which he had sold to Eisen when we needed money. Josei Insui meant that the painter was a woman, Ei.

It was Eisen who convinced me to sign that little book within the book with my own name.

B
efore too long Eisen and I had a contract to do another work. It was to be called
The Sexual Joy of Women.
We were sitting around thinking up ideas.

“What would make a woman happy in congress?” he asked.

“To have a lover who was all fingers coax her to conclusion without entering her.”

This was how we thought of the octopus.

Our story was based on a folktale. The heroine was an ama diver who was abducted and was being escorted to the palace of the King of the Undersea. The octopus was her escort. He had his young son with him. He asked the ama what she would like. She asked him to make love to her. It was originally a tale of female self-sacrifice: she was pleasing her escort. But in our version, the ama was adventurous. They paused in the lee of some rocks, and the octopus served her there with his great wide mouth and his eight tentacles.

Eisen wrote his usual ludicrous dialogue: he tucked it in all around the great reclining forms of the woman and her bulb-headed amorous friend, which I drew.

squid maximus: My wish comes true at last, this day of days; finally I have you in my grasp! Your “bobo” is ripe and full. How wonderful! Superior to all others! . . . All eight tentacles intertwine without and within! How do you like it this way?

maiden: There! Good, good. Aaaah! Yes, it tingles now; soon there will be no sensation at all left in my hips. Ooooooh! Boundaries and borders gone! I’ve vanished!

squid minimum: After Daddy finishes, I too want to rub and rub my suckers at the ridge of your furry place until you disappear . . .

I took the design to the publishing house. The publisher assumed my father had done it. He said, “That Hokusai! He has the most grotesque imagination! He will think of such horrors!” He shook his head over the design, but he took it. “Has he gone too far this time?” murmured the publisher. His cheeks had become frozen. “This poor ama diver is paralyzed with fear.”

“No, no,” I offered. “I can assure you, she is in raptures.”

R
EBECCA’S FRIEND KATE BROWN
, the artist, came for tea. She made beautiful images of halos and harnesses with gold paste on velvet. They ate their scones in the office, with Kate sitting on the down sofa while the dog tried to derail their chat with his whines and snuffling-up of anything that came close to the edge of the table.

Rebecca told Kate about the image that had people shaking their heads over Hokusai’s depraved imagination—of the ama diver being given head by a giant octopus.

She opened it on her computer screen. The octopus and the lady.

“Wow,” said Kate.

The high, bald pate of the giant octopus with its black Betty Boop eyes rose between the diving woman’s open thighs. Its multi-suction-cupped tendrils wound over her arms and across her neck. She did not struggle or attempt to escape; in fact, she hung onto one tendril very firmly, as if it were a rope to steady her. Another pointed tendril made a neat circle around one of her small nipples.

“For roughly
170
years people have found this harrowing,” said Rebecca. “The poor diver has been captured by a voracious octopus and is being violently ‘ravaged.’ What do you think?”

“Of course it’s shocking,” hedged Kate. “It’s not the sort of thing one normally sees. You’d say it was intimate if it showed two people. But how can you be intimate with an octopus?”

“Everything is cold about an octopus. The water, the slippery skin.”

“But the picture isn’t cold; it’s sunlit and warm. It’s a fantasy. But it’s an unusual one. A female fantasy,” Kate said, “from a bizarre, fearless mind.”

It was the rule in shunga that the woman wears no expression on her face and the male is dominant. But this one was the exception. The woman’s face showed a trance-like rapture.

Kate Brown stared some more. “The diving girl is being loved by the octopus. What is so shocking about that?”

Odd, definitely. Bizarre. But not, apparently, an ordeal. Not a rape. A delicious submission. That’s what made the drawing a scandal—its point of view.

“I believe she did it. No man imagined this.”

“He wouldn’t identify: he wouldn’t see himself as either the recipient of these attentions or the donor.”

“How can it be by a man? There is no probing tool in the picture.”

Ha, ha, ha, they laughed.

A
nd I the ghost laugh too. I thumb my nose again at those who said I was gloomy and dour. The dark days had their rewards.

36

The Sign of the Nighthawk

I DIDN’T SLEEP
, with my father snuffling and kicking on the other side of the room. In the morning he was down on his knees as usual, chuckling over his brush sketch of the God of Good Fortune—jovial and busy, his Hotei looked quite a lot like Hokusai himself.

In the alley I put my hands on the small of my back and arched my neck to the sky. Then I curled my spine over and swung my head down around my ankles. I did some dipping and turning, squatting and reaching, in an imitation of the training I’d sampled with Shino years ago. I was coaxing my good spirits to return.