“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.
I looked down at my hands. I willed the complacent ferryman to push harder, stroke faster.
“It’s no fun to be the older one,” he had said once. “You’re young and have everything coming to you. I have had most of it. When you’re an old woman you may have a young lover. Maybe then you’ll understand.”
I reached the Asakusa grounds. Crowds of men stood at the doors of the restaurants and teahouses. A street musician was remonstrating with his disobedient monkey, and a little crowd jeered. It began to rain again.
“Entertainment to the daimyo! See it here first. Watch what the noblemen and noblewomen watch in their homes in the High City.” The monkey was dressed in women’s clothes and had been taught to mince and play a flute. A boy passed a bowl to collect the coins that fell with a dull clink from dirty hands.
I pushed through the standing bodies, which were solid and resistant to my pressure. I made my way along the row of small houses with their closed screens right to the end and turned the corner into a side street, now mostly in darkness after the brightly lit market. Three, four doors in was where he would be. I came to a door: behind it I saw a single lamp burning.
When the screen opened I bowed. My umbrella bowed with me, hiding my face. “Is this the place where Shikitei Sanba is resting?” I whispered.
“Who are you?”
The woman stood erect, and her voice was strong. I felt her eyes making holes in my umbrella. I tipped it up and looked into the face. A woman older than me, but not a dragon. She drew in her breath. She rocked back a little, then forward. She knew the situation. She was enjoying her revenge.
“So the news has flushed out the lowlife,” she said.
Her rudeness gave me strength. No need to repent, then. I raised my head. “I have come to inquire about his health.”
“His health is not good. The signs can no longer be ignored.”
It seemed an accusation, as if I had been ignoring signs, as if I were complicit in this illness. I let the umbrella fall and the rain come down on my head. I would drown if she wanted me to, here in the rain. But she didn’t want that either.
“You might as well come in.” She stepped back. I came over the doorsill. From the back came his voice. Vinegar, with angry wit. “Enchantress, are we entertaining?”
“We are not entertaining,” his wife called hoarsely. “We are caring for the sick, and the sick is you.”
“Ah, yes,” said Sanba, and he gave his little cough. “We mustn’t forget, must we?” The cough was stronger. But his voice was no weaker. The music of its bass, the rumble, convivial, the tickle of it, inviting laughter. He’s not ill, I thought. He’s the same!
She saw me take heart.
“Don’t be encouraged,” she said coldly. “Your eyes will tell you what your ears will not.”
“If we’re not entertaining, who has come in?” The voice of Sanba was a beautiful thing.
“It is your girl.”
Silence from the back room. I could picture his sudden childish look of being caught out. His wife swung her hand sideways: go to him.
He was staring at the ceiling. I could see the glint of his bottles: he was using his own ridiculous remedies, his secret elixirs for immortality.
“My old eyes like it dim,” he always said, turning down the wick.
His features were sharper than ever. His skin was a little yellow, his cheeks were hollow, and around his eyelashes there was a crusted crystal substance that made the lids sparkle.
“Sanba.”
“Ah! She’s right! It is my girl.” His hand drifted out.
I was not a girl. I had been when we started. But now I was twenty-two.
I wanted to lie with him and curl towards the warmth of him. But he was hot; the air smelled bad. I was repelled, and anyway his wife was there. And where was the child?
“I tell you what I want,” he continued, as if I had asked. “An outing. We will meet at the theatre,” he said. “Buy sticky rice and take it with us to the Nakamura. But instead of staying all day, we will leave at dusk. We will take a little boat to the Three Forks and lie under the trees.”
His wife stood just behind me.
“Get your father to release you. On the night of the full moon. It is how many days from now? I’m losing track,” he said. “I lie here and try to open my eyes, and the days slide away from me. But I will be better then.”
“Full moon is in five days.”
“On that day I will meet you at the Nakamura. If you can manage to get away.” His attention wandered.
I was forgotten, a leftover doll from carefree, cut-away days that had even then been entirely separate from his life, this wife, this mattress, this stared-at ceiling. I had no place here, and yet the voice, the profile in the dark—it was him. He was mine.
His wife dug her toe into my buttock.
“Go on, speak.” She was asking me to bring him back.
“Sanba,” I whispered.
“Yes.”
“We’re nearly finished the album of laughing pictures. You know, the story about the servant and the mistress who are lovers. And she dreams of taking to the road with him . . .”
We talked about our work this way.
He gave a little expiration of air. “I wish you luck with it,” he said. He said it in a way that showed he understood everything: the work, the dream, even the toe in my tail.
“You are an artist, and it will never be easy,” he said. “If you’re lucky and if you’re clever, you will survive. Promise me something.”
What could I promise? Why would I promise?
“Anything. It will keep me hoping,” he said.
“I promise to make the best colours in Edo,” I said.
“Ah,” he said.
The voice was captive, in his body and in that little house. I imagined I would steal it away. Wrap it in a cloth, in cardboard, roll it and put it in a scroll box. I would free it from this room and from this sickness. I would unroll it when I too lay on my mat staring up through the top of the house, staring into the stars and the sky, or where they would be if the roof were taken off, as if it were made by artists in that lying way, making the inside outside. His voice would be in the stars, and I would go there too. We would look down and see ourselves: tiny, finger-sized creatures in the maze of streets and screens and walls and alleyways and narrow canals that was Edo.
“Sanba?” I said.
He came back. “Yes?”
“If the day is not good?”
“Then we will take a raincheck,” he said. As he said the word “raincheck,” his voice cracked. It was just a small crack, through that low, masculine, scratchy voice. I heard it. As if he might, if he stopped, break down. As if the crust might split and something hot, scalding, true, deep, and violent would break out. I never knew what that something was, what he might have said if we had met as before. That was his goodbye.
M
y face was wet. The wife sat watching me with faint curiosity. She didn’t trouble to be angry with me. The son, a handsome boy of ten, came in. Ministrations were in order. The patient seemed to sleep. I had only dreamed our long hours together, the white paint and the red slashes on the faces of the actors, the lying down and the getting up to go to the teahouse for sake. The grisly murders and black rages we had sat through, with him scribbling and me shouting, were ghost scenes. Real life, this tamed and vapid thing, this yellowed, patchy remnant, had taken its sad victory.
I wormed my way backwards out the door and over the threshold. I knew I had hoisted it only when I heard the rain falling on my umbrella like the crackling of some fire.
M
y father took one look at me and knew. He showed no emotion at what must have been, for him too, tragic news about a friend. He examined the page of waves and passed me a page of comb designs; to him it was boring work, but he could still bring a sense of fun. Could I? A comb was a comb, or was it a view of Mt. Fuji, a bridge, or a wave? Maybe a trotting pig. Pigs were a problem because they had feet. Better that it be a wave. There was a resemblance between a curling wave, its foam a white rim along its top curving edge, and hair pulled over a comb.
We worked in silence. The hardness in my father steadied me. He did not have to speak. What he had to say was palpable: What did I expect? People had wives—that was a given. People became ill. People fell by the wayside, foundered, and died. They were the weak. Sanba had fallen prey.
There was even a sense not of vindication, exactly, but of affirmation: my father had won. Shikitei Sanba, noted expert on the kabuki, satirist and peer, purveyor of the elixir of immortality, had been caught by the demons. He would die, most likely. This was the dirty work of life; this was its not-so-secret destination. While Hokusai went on. He was sixty-two years old—by ordinary measure, already an ancient man. He would not die. Not yet.
We sat working. I felt the impermanence of our surroundings, my father’s imperative to live. Work dried up. Censors got on your trail. Illness stalked. You had to reinvent, rename, and reposition. You had to fight off the oncoming threat. Outlive the others. My father was good at it. He was better than good: he was inspired. From those who were caught, he became detached, as if they might contaminate him.