The Printmaker's Daughter (19 page)

At first the man buys the sake.

Second, the sake buys the sake.

Third, the sake buys the man.

There is no limit to the way sake leads to disorder.

I
T WAS AUTUMN
and the wind blew the fragile awnings—
bang,
bang
—against the shop fronts. The Mad Poets sat outside the teahouse by the Asakusa temple. I had a slate with me and was practicing my characters. In the road, a thick figure appeared, wrapped up against the cold. Sadanobu. Again. The artists followed him with their eyes.

“Why does he come around here?”

“He’s haunting us.”

“Maybe he’s ready to publish his novel.”

But the jokes were thin.

“Maybe he too is frightened,” said Sanba. “He wanted to make history. But history makes itself. And it will not make him look pretty.”

The wind came down through the housetops and made the lamps swing. The glow passed over Sadanobu’s face, uneven, orange, white, then gone. It passed over all the other faces, simplifying them, making them stark.

“I do believe he wants to tell us something,” said Sanba.

Sadanobu moved in closer and, in that curious way of his, placed his body at right angles to become a silhouette, a caricature—soft paunch, hard chin, big nose. He took no notice of the jibes. His voice was low and reasonable. “I come to give a warning. A warning for the one they call Hokusai.”

The Mad Poets were not to be intimidated. “There is no one by that name. Hokkubei, Hokuba, Hokutsu, Hokuta? I don’t know who you mean.”

“There was an artist of that name, but he sold the honor to a student.”

Sadanobu appeared to laugh, silently, into his large belly. It rose and fell.

“Hokusai should know there are laws against giving details of Japanese life to foreigners,” he said.

Then he moved on.

I looked at my father. He took a drink. It had come. What would we do?

Nothing, apparently.

T
HERE WAS A
discreet knock and the studio door slid open. Father became alert, showing no sign of recognition but going slightly pink.

It was Shino.

Her long, thin face had become sharper during her days at the low-class brothel. The scar on her cheek had healed and sat just along her jawbone, almost invisible. The great bundle of hair wrapped on top of her head and pierced with several pins seemed to have stolen the energy from the rest of her body. The wide sleeves of her kimono and a thick obi dwarfed her figure, but the narrow lower skirt clung to her legs and pooled at her feet. She still looked too genteel for the life she led.

How had she come out of the Yoshiwara? She must have been on business, but what business?

I went to her. I had not seen her for months. My father snapped.

“Ei! I asked you to look at Mr. Bohachi’s drawing.”

“I did. It’s not very good!”

The master gave an elaborate shrug. But he couldn’t hide his smile. “Do you see,” he said to Shino, “how she becomes more and more like me?”

“I thought I would take Ei to the bath, if you can spare her,” said Shino.

Tatsu and O-Miyo looked annoyed. They minded my special treatment.

“Why should she be excused? She has work to do.”

“She will discuss work with Miss Shino.”

“Why always Ei?” muttered Tatsu. She scowled as I edged to the door.

“You are too old to whine, Tatsu. Get to work,” said my father.

And we were gone. At the foot of the bridges mendicants were chanting and holding out their bowls: “Praise the Sutra of the Lotus. Praise the name of the Founder.” They brought with them a scent of country air; they had parcels of mountain herbs tied around their necks. A mad-eyed soothsayer crouched with both fists holding a long bowl between her legs. “See your future,” she called. Shino dodged her, refusing apologetically.

“I don’t want to see my future,” she said. “If I can’t change it, why should I be warned?”

When she said that, I imagined the worst.

“Is there news? Is it bad?”

“News is whatever we make it,” she said. “We must always be hopeful.”

Life in the Yoshiwara was changing her. In the sunlight I could see wrinkles at the corners of her eyes and furrows beside her nose. Her beautiful hair did not shine as before, and the knot was wound in a way that looked several days old.

We reached the bathhouse. The entrance was marked with a carved wooden arrow. The sign read:
ADULTS, 10
MON.
CHILDREN, 8
MON.
Shino counted out the square-holed coins. The men’s bath was next door, and the wife of the man who ran the men’s bath ran the women’s bath. The men’s assistant peeked around the wall into our bath; he needed soap powder, he said. But I think he wanted to look at Shino. She was someone you wanted to watch. She was still taller than me. While we both lacked beauty, she had grace. I was short and bowlegged, like my father. My chin stuck out when I asserted my will, which was often. But Shino was quizzical, with that piquant face and frequently downcast eyes. Men liked that. They were misled into thinking she was meek.

We got our washing cloths and kicked off our sandals, untying our sashes. We squatted with small wooden buckets and scrubbed under arms and between legs, splashing the suds onto the polished wooden floors. We doused off the soap. We stepped carefully along the slippery wooden platform and tested the steaming water. The bucket boy eyed us.

“Too hot, is it?” he said. He was always polite around Shino. Everyone was. “Too cold?” Other women banged on the side of the wooden tub to get his attention: not us.

“A little more hot would be wonderful. You are very kind,” she said.

The women looked up for a minute to hear her accent, before they went back to their pressing conversations.

Across from us were two wives, weirdly featureless, with no eyebrows and blackened teeth, complaining about their mothers-in-law. One had a good one, but she was old; the other had a nasty one, who was unfortunately young and stood a good chance of living for many years to come.

“I wonder how mine will be?” Shino said, bobbing her head significantly in their direction.

She had in her indirect way told me two things: that she would not be going back to the old husband and that she would marry. I sucked air between my teeth. “Are you really going to marry? How can you?”

“I received word. My husband has died.” Her face was impassive.

“So you don’t have to send him money?”

“His brother now claims the money,” she whispered.

An old lady bent like a scythe came to the edge of the tub. She had no teeth. Shino stood to help her down to the water. The rinsing boy came up and took the hand away from her. “No, you don’t,” he said. “That’s my job.”

Shino sat down again. She scooped the steam up against her cheeks. She closed her eyes. It was what she did when she was thinking. Or crying.

“But I could be free to leave the pleasure quarter. The blind man—as you call him—has offered to pay my debts.”

I blew across the foamy surface. I slapped the water. “Hey, you! Cut that out!” said the married women in unison.

“In return for?”

“He would take me as a wife.”

The rinsing boy was pouring water on the bent woman’s back; she had small, round
moxa
scars all over it, from the burning of herbs we practiced for healing. I stared gloomily at her.

“If that happened, would you be glad for me?” said Shino. “It would take some time . . .”

Why would I be glad, if she was crying? Why, if she was glad, had she said she didn’t want to know her future?

“It is the best possible outcome,” she said delicately.

I snorted. She was pretending to discuss with me what was already settled.

The woman beside Shino dropped her washing rag into the bath. It floated a minute, absorbing the water, and then disappeared. The bucket boy came, all gallantry, and dove into the deep. God knows what he saw down there.

“Better than what?”

The unspoken possibility of my father buying her, keeping her, freeing her sat in the air between us and then sank into the hot water as well. It would never happen.

“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 among 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.”

As 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 spilled 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 among the cooking pots outside. She was a crash-and-burn cook, and a messy one. Hokusai sat like a happy, wiry Buddha in the center 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 favorite. 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 find the money 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 take, the two of them, to the rental boats and riverbeds to spend their passion? 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.