The Ghost Brush (94 page)

It was dark and the snow had begun again when I came to a small temple to the Fox God. There was a candle burning there. I stepped inside and rubbed my hands over the flame. I breathed into the cup of my palms and drew that breath back inside me: warmth. I stepped back onto the path and looked up. Finally I saw, just off the path, a set of steps leading up into the hill.

I climbed into the tops of the trees. There were lanterns. There was a temple roof. For the first time I hesitated. I had come all this way. Was I doing the right thing? I was discarding a man’s protection in a world for men only. Was it foolish?

Yes.

But was I prepared to cook?

No.

Here was the gate. No one chased me. I did not have to throw my shoes ahead to assure my safety. I walked slowly and thoughtfully under its welcome roof and stood in the courtyard in silence. I could hear the nuns singing. I went towards the voices.

I
don’t remember how they welcomed me that night. How did I ever get warm? The marrow of my bones had frozen solid. I was wet up past my knees.

“Is anyone pursuing you?” the nuns wanted to know. They waved their incense over me.

“No,” I said.

“It is a tribute to your great strength to arrive in such weather.”

I
STAYED FOR THREE MONTHS
. I described my innocent husband to the Suigetsu kannon, a tiny female figure who stood beside the pool and gazed at the full moon in the water. “He is not angry. He is not violent. He does not drink to excess, and I have not been beaten.”

The water shimmered; the kannon maintained her curious fraction of a smile. “What on earth do you find fault with, then?” she seemed to say.

“He does not see me. He wants me to cook and sew,” I said. “He wants me to be other than what I am.”

My grievances sounded petty even to my own ears. Other fugitives had bruises and scaldings; they screamed in their dreams.

“What woman expects to be seen for herself?”

I did.

“Does he berate you for being barren?”

“No, he does not. Yes, I am barren. I am glad to be barren. I need every hour of my day to paint.” I found that I did have complaints about him. “He resents my work. He resents my old father. He fears me, and fear makes him cruel.”

These merciful nuns heard and did not criticize me. They understood study and prayer, and they understood the need for silence. They alone allowed that art made its demands on my person. They had their methods to secure the divorce I wanted. They set about it. There was no contest. The husband had to file a letter of just three and a half lines. Tomei’s epistle, written on thick mulberry paper in careful brushwork, arrived to join the hundreds of other letters kept in the treasure house.

“She is not a proper wife. I do not want her and release her. She is free to go where she likes and to marry whomever she pleases. She is useless to me.”

I read it by the pool. The kannon winked. She had saved me. But I was to be called “useless.” That was the price. I folded the paper and tucked it in my sleeve.

Spring came. The grounds were covered in moss; the old stones greened with it, the grasses luminous in their newness. I walked in the graveyard, where there were statues of famous nuns of the past. I wandered the gardens and painted the flowers—narcissus, hydrangea. I walked out to the harbour. It was April, the season for fishing bonito.

The bonito came on the Black Tide. The fishermen were out in their boats with their nets. I watched the waves; I walked beside them. I thought of my father and how he must need me. From the beach I could see Mt. Fuji, resplendent in its cape of dazzling snow.

Part 3

27

Labyrinth

LOOK DOWN ON THIS SITUATION
from the air, as I do.

There is Rebecca in her small, pumpkin-coloured study—her “office,” she calls it, because she wishes she were more businesslike—with her walls strung with clothesline on which are pinned ukiyo-e prints, her desk scattered with papers, including her stack of expensive museum catalogues, whose heavy pages she leafs through, looking for needles in haystacks, sighing. The sun comes up; it sinks into the trees to the west. The leaves come out, they turn; the full moon shocks by its silvery inquisition through the bare branches—and she is still there.

The man called Andrew comes to the door, peers over her shoulder at what she’s writing, gives her encouraging pats and kisses. They live together now. He goes to work and he comes home and he tells her about where he’s been (she hasn’t been anywhere) and the dog goes ballistic because he’s going to have a walk. The “kids” come over too, Mike and sometimes Jenna, each of them taking that identical swooping, backwards fall onto the ancient down sofa that they have taken since they were ten. They are getting a new job or are back in school choosing their courses. They suffer a breakup and find someone new and borrow money, move to a condo. And she is still here.

After dinner and a bath she sometimes sneaks up to that room again, and when she’s getting into bed at night she starts breaking the news to Andrew that she’s going on another research trip. Which itself is misleading as you cannot research what is not there; you cannot unearth what was never buried. You can nose around, feel around, speculate.

She is a blind man measuring an elephant.

Hokusai made a manga of that. Actually there is a group of blind men. The elephant stands quite still while its assessors climb on ladders to lean over its shoulders and down the other side, hug its legs, lift its ears and tail. The elephant co-operates while the blind men try to figure out what the hell that big thing is. But the name would convey very little, in fact. Why should the blind men care what it is called? They want to know what it is like: those lumpy knees, the thin tail with the tassel, and the ears. How does it all go together? What does it do? How did it come to be?

Spurred on by my heckling, by instinct, she has found that man in Japan whom John Carpenter mentioned, and she has read, in translation, the work of the researcher who did all the digging. She has found an essay about the many inaccuracies in attributing the Hokusai paintings. It looks at all the paintings and divides them into zones around a centre, so a diagram would look like a bull’s eye. In the centre—the black zone, or bull’s eye—are paintings definitely by the Old Man. Those are rare. Moving out from there are, in different categories, “Studio Works,” then “Delegated Works,” and finally “Out-and-Out Forgeries.” The author blames Dog Hokusai.

We knew his tricks. But he wasn’t the only one.

She has also found the essay John Carpenter recommended from the podium that day in Washington. By Richard Lane, it’s called “Labyrinth or Hornets’ Nest.” Lane too says that genuine Hokusais are rare. He makes a list of what constitutes a genuine Hokusai. Unfortunately it’s a little vague: “a sense of completeness or balance,” “a vibrant, living quality to the brush stroke,” “a sense of age” in the silk, paper, and pigments. Amateurs, he says, trained by dealers and auction houses, are attracted to forgeries. This is because amateurs are overconfident and need to save face.

“Certain Japanese scholars have hypothesized that some Hokusai forgeries might be the work of his daughter Oei. Their examples, however, seem to me to be patently post-Meiji productions, and without solid evidence such views encroach on the bounds of fantasy: it is more the province of novelists and playwrights.”

Well! Why is it fantasy to believe the daughter might be involved? Being a daughter, is she by definition out of contention? And why “novelists” with such disdain?

He has managed to insult both the ghost and her scribe.

Of the famous Hokusai paintings in museums around the world the ones that most often are questioned are the “Dutch paintings.” It seems the whole world of scholarship recognizes they are not exactly mint Hokusai. Nor are they signed or sealed. Here, Lane softens his misogyny: “One other intriguing possibility we might cite is [that the works were painted by] Hokusai’s own daughter Oei . . . It is not my duty here to prove who actually did them but only to record my view that it was probably not Hokusai.”

O
NE DAY REBECCA DID GET OUT OF THE HOUSE
. She made her way up to find Yusuke the translator. She discovered him in his lair.

“Yusuke! I’d given up on you.”

He had excuses. He had been to Japan and had suffered jet lag on his return. But he had not been off the job. In fact, he had begun to develop an interest in the subject. He’d found Hokusai’s grave. He would send a picture of it, with himself standing in front. He’d looked at recent books on Hokusai. He had also seen an exhibition about Hokusai and the Dutch.

He’d bought the catalogue.

“First time,” he said, “I believe you a little bit. First time I see Oei is mentioned. It is a present for you.”

Rebecca sat down to look. Hokusai’s—and Oei’s—relationship with the Dutch trader von Siebold was spelled out in pictures. A set of paintings that was brought back from Japan to Holland was included. Oei was given credit—as co-creator of some of the pictures. Progress! Rebecca was excited.

In return she handed Yusuke some Xeroxed pages of smudged, small text in Japanese.

“What is this you are giving me? Not more?”

“A couple of articles, approximately three pages.”

Yusuke pushed the papers away.

“You know that paying for the translation of unknown documents is like buying lottery tickets,” he grumbled.

“I don’t buy lottery tickets,” she said firmly. She pushed them back at him.

M
aybe Rebecca didn’t, but I did. This translator man was eccentric, unusual in men from my country; I liked him. Buying lottery tickets was just the sort of thing a disreputable woman like me would do. And it was one of my few vices. It was one way I blew away our money, Hokusai’s and my money. I gave him a little encouraging push.

But Yusuke chided Rebecca. He said she was ambitious. And a little crazy. “There is nothing more you can find out about the Edo period. It’s all lost. You might as well write science fiction.”

She gave a quizzical smile. “It may end up that way.”

I nudged him again. And he capitulated. Took the articles, raised his glasses, and peered at the tiny characters in all their smudginess.

“In a couple of weeks?” He turned back to his screen with its bright white pages and gaudy pictures.

28

Von Siebold at Nagasaki, 1823

ON THE FAN-SHAPED ISLAND
in Nagasaki Bay, the Dutch doctor sat at his piano. His fingers ran up and down the keys.

The fingers were strong and long, easily reaching an octave and a half. At the end of a run he rapped each yellowed ivory hard, twice: this was meant to be a workout. A surgeon needed strong hands.

The music rattled in the stillness. The Japanese guards who knelt at the doors gritted their teeth.

The doctor was a prisoner. His back door was the Water Gate and opened onto waves. That was where the ships docked. His front door was the City Gate and led to the town of Nagasaki. He was not allowed to go out there. And few people from the town were allowed in through the gate. On the high wall beside it was a sign that said, in Japanese and Dutch, “No Priests. No Beggars. No Women.” Smaller brush strokes added: “With the Exception of Prostitutes Bearing a Red Stamp in Their Papers.”

Phillip Franz von Siebold was twenty-seven. He was tall and blond, a strikingly beautiful man, although so strange did he appear to the Japanese that they imagined him to be a demon. The upper half of his face was generous: he had wide eyes and eyebrows that sprouted above deep sockets; his forehead was flat, and his look was ready. Below the eyes his face was quite different: it became narrow and sensitive. His nose ran like a plumb line down his face, long and thin; his lips, also long and thin, crossed it but, happily, turned up at the corners. He had been smiling since he arrived. But the smile was wearing. He was impatient. The world outside the City Gate was rich beyond knowing.

He wore a uniform with epaulettes. The gold tassels on his shoulders shook. Up and down the ivories he went, fingers leaping, chin bobbing. He and the other traders of the Dutch East India Company lived on this manmade island called Deshima, at the very edge of the closed country of Japan. Von Siebold’s job was to provide medical care to his countrymen. There weren’t many of them left: trade had dwindled and did not justify the posting. Only curiosity did, and a collector’s avid desire for artifacts. The Dutch wanted information about the Japanese; they wanted objects, pictures and growing things, trees and flowers. Phillip von Siebold was the perfect man to collect these.

If only he could escape his little island prison.

He had landed a month ago. When his mind returned to the wild sea journey, he planted his feet wide on the floor under his piano stool, as if the stool might buck him off, as if he had to ride it like a horse. Sailing from Batavia in late spring, the ship Drie Gezusters had been caught in a typhoon as it approached the southern tip of the Japanese islands. Von Siebold was lurching along the deck thinking he might die. When he saw a fishing boat foundering in the waves, with no sails or oars, he shouted: “They’re going down! Can we hook them?”