“I can’t accept this,” I said, pushing it back to him.
“Yes, you can,” he said, pushing it back towards me. I was confused because his hands touched mine.
“Do you know the story of how it was discovered?” von Siebold said, covering this awkward moment.
“No.” I passed a small amount of the pigment between my forefingers and thumb. I rubbed it onto the top of my hands, the way actors tested their white makeup. It went into the lines of my skin. It was that fine.
“Scientists made it by accident. They were trying to make red. Isn’t that funny? It has iron in it, I suppose,” he said. “Please accept it; I am eager to see what your father can do with it.”
He had forgotten that I was a painter too.
He squeezed my hand.
I took the packet.
A
WEEK LATER,
I returned to the Nagasakiya. I presented him the first of the paintings: my father’s print
A View of Both Banks of the Sumida River,
an older one but we still had a copy. He wanted a Beauty, a
bijin-ga,
so I sold him the silk painting
Courtesan Inspecting Her Coiffure.
We said it was by Hokusai, but it was studio work. I felt a little guilty. I had not had time to use the
beru
yet.
This time he showed his pleasure at seeing me. He smiled widely and took each of my hands in his.
The place was quiet; it was as if the Dutch had been forgotten, stranded in the midst of the clogged streets of Edo. His secretary served me coffee that was rich and bitter. He showed me his specimens. He had a collecting album, each page a little pocket into which was tucked a dried, pressed flower. We looked at a hairy primrose that grew only on a mountain in the Kiso Valley. He showed me dried blossoms of the early blooming Yoshino cherry, leaves of the Zelkova tree, a large kanoko lily, and some seeds of a hydrangea. That was his favourite; he wanted to name it after his wife, Otaki. He grew them on his prison-island and sent the seeds, and even the living specimens, to Holland. He collected tea plants as well and sent them to the Dutch islands.
“The exotica of Japan,” he said dreamily, “going out into the world. Flowers, tea, your father’s pictures, your ways, of which I will write in my book.”
“Our ways are exotic?” To me they were harsh.
“Oh, yes. They are exotic and even bizarre to our eyes. But this will end, with the foreigners coming and our ways colouring the water as tea leaves do.”
I smiled at his metaphor. It was something he was learning from our speech, I felt. “Will foreigners come?” I wanted it but could not believe it would happen.
“It can’t be helped. They will come here from all over the world. The Shogun cannot keep the walls up around these islands forever.”
T
HE SHOGUN TOYED WITH THE DUTCH.
The official visit was delayed further. Crowds collected in front of the Nagasakiya. The Dutch were easy to see, in their locked house.
“The Dutchman told me about beautiful things that he collected along the road,” I said to Hokusai. “He found a giant salamander, longer than my two arms stretched apart. Its head is flat and triangular, like a stone arrowhead made by the Indians of North America.”
I had visited half a dozen times. Then I came home and told my father stories. I liked being the one with stories to tell. I repeated the one about the emperor Napoleon, who defeated the king and queen of France and who lost his power once he lost his wife. I told him about ice, and how it could be made and stored in a special box with electricity. I told him that there was a wild man with long hair who walked through the forests of the New World sketching birds that no one had ever seen before.
When I went next to the Nagasakiya to deliver pictures, the doctor had a question for me. On his journey to Edo he had left the expedition to visit a magistrate. He had discovered that after he left, the bakufu put the magistrate under house arrest. He was concerned.
“What law did the magistrate break?” he asked, sincerely puzzled.
“He talked to you.”
“But many people talk to me! You are talking to me.”
“It’s true,” I said. “It may seem that there is no law, or that no one obeys it. But don’t be mistaken. The laws exist. They are kept secret.”
He rocked back on his high heels. “Secret laws! What is the point of that?”
“To instil fear! The Shogun is a stalking tiger. The tiger can be very patient. His prey can mosey along or skip and run. It does not matter. Suddenly he takes a step too far and the tiger pounces.”
He examined my face.
“You will make a note for your book that this Japanese woman has nonsensical and primitive fears,” I said. “But you should take heed.”
Von Siebold was taken with the women in the many pictures I brought showing our rituals, like Two Women and a Boy at the Time of the Boys’ Festival and A Merchant Making Up the Accounts at the End of the Year.
It seemed we had a friendship, despite our differences.
We talked then about slavery. The sale of the Negroes of Africa to work as animals on plantations in America. I said I abhorred it and I said this with disgust.
“People are not to be bought and sold,” I said.
His hand twitched as if he wanted to take notes. “You display an unusual passion,” he said.
In my visits to von Siebold I saw Mogami Tokunai with his imperial guards, also Mamiya Rinzo: these men made maps. They had official roles in the palace. My father knew them from the meetings of the Dutch scholars, but neither recognized me. As I passed them, I felt fear. Maps were forbidden to us. The Shogun received them from the gods. I supposed the men who copied these god-given maps had curiosity, like the rest of us. But at what cost?
One day I saw a man waiting in the courtyard of the Nagasakiya. The servant called him Globius. Many Japanese had asked for Dutch names and been given them. This new-naming was popular now even amongst the high-born. “Who is the man they call Globius?” I asked my father.
“You saw Globius there?” said Hokusai. He whistled. “He is the man who reads the stars for the Shogun.” So it went as far as the stars, this eagerness for Dutch learning. I remembered what von Siebold had said about the Dutch flaunting the laws while the Japanese turned a blind eye. I disagreed. There was no blind eye. The eye blinked, but it missed nothing.
I
made my thanks to von Siebold. Then I told him I had an additional, special painting for him. I told him that it was a gift, and that he should open it after he had left. I did not think I could bear to have him see it and not know I painted it. I had made it especially for him, painting it on silk, not the Dutch paper. It was modelled on a picture of a young courtesan my father had done ten years ago. I had the sketch. But I had turned her around and given her a face that showed how she felt, and even how I felt. I had worked long hours on this painting and I loved it. I called it
Promenading Courtesan.
I was proud of that painting and I wished it luck as it went out into the world far away, the world of Europe.
I held it on my two palms, stretched my arms towards him, and bowed. It was the way samurai bowed to their swords.
Von Siebold thanked me graciously. He unrolled it and looked at it carefully. “This painting is like a jewel,” he said.
I bowed my head, just a little. It seemed he understood it was mine.
“Why is her head inclined sideways?”
“We often take this shape.” To me it was a broken shape, but I did not say so. “She is on parade,” I said, “in the pleasure district.”
“I suppose it is a matter of training,” he said slowly. “The women are subjected to much that is abhorrent.” He was at his note-making again. “The Japanese woman,” he said, “is quiet and obedient. She is always concerned with the welfare of others. Never with herself.”
I wanted to fall over sideways, as I did with my father when something preposterous was said. I did not.
“You live amongst women,” he said. “Truly, maybe you can help me understand. How can they be so selfless?”
Had he tried that opinion on my husband? Had he seen my sisters? Had he heard my mother lambaste my father? Perhaps I would have to agree with the Old Man: von Siebold was a fool. A likeable, romantic fool. He could never tell a real Hokusai from a fake.
I cleared my throat with a little cough. I wanted to speak frankly. But I could not. Here was a stranger to our land, and it shamed me to speak about our realities. And in what sort of code were we communicating? Was he speaking about the suffering of the women in the Yoshiwara, as I was? In short, I was at a loss for words. “Perhaps we are not taught that we have a self.”
“Then it is good teaching. These women are so gentle,” von Siebold pressed. “How is it created in them?”
I thought of the exhausting nights, rising and moving from one man to another. The training, from childhood, that men must come first. The small rebellions stifled, one by one; the self-denial turned to ritual.
“Through great brutality,” I said.
He stared at me. “You speak like a monk.”
I was happier because he seemed to be listening. “You don’t see everything, even with that thing in your hat.” I teased him as I teased my father. “I am not docile or gentle.”
“No,” he said, musingly.
This was always my problem: being a woman and not being one. It opened up some kind of wound. I felt raw. I felt desire. I backed away and turned my face down and to the side.
“How has the training of Japan failed in you? You’re different. A bohemian, perhaps? The avant-garde? You’re like a whole new species.”
“Is the new species me? I often think it is the other.” I was careful. You never knew who would hear. “Some men in Japan think they have the right to distort the habits and instincts of other human beings for their own pleasure. That is your courtesan you see there.” I answered with a laugh. “I am not new. I am a very old species. Like the giant salamander. Unseen, but original. A woman who has not been domesticated.”
“I suppose your father is responsible,” he mused. “The court painter, able to be his own man.”
He still thought Hokusai was a court painter! I shook my head. “Aren’t the docile women odd? You talk of species. This woman,” I said, nodding at my poor courtesan, “this species is against nature. It must forgo any pleasure of its own. It must serve, and suffer, so the needs of the male are filled. No animal is like this. This is the idea of selfish men. Where do they get the right?”
“Oh, my,” he said. Or something like that. Had he seen my touch on the scroll? He asked no more questions. Of course he had much on his mind. But none of the paintings was signed. Hokusai always signed his work. You would think that even a foreigner would insist. But perhaps he thought we were protecting ourselves from the Shogun’s laws.
W
hen I came next with our last finished works, von Siebold confided that he had arranged to trade with that same Globius, the court astronomer. Globius had a map of the islands to the north. Von Siebold had a map of Edo, as well as a map of the whole nation of Japan.
“This will not be looked upon lightly,” I protested.
“Why? Knowledge must travel!” His eyes lit with fervour. “People want to know. Laws that stifle the curiosity of man are futile laws and cannot last.”
“But you yourself can’t make an end to ‘futile laws,’ as you call them.”
“It’s only a map.”
I had to tell him that pictures and words on paper inspired the rage of the Shogun almost more than anything else. I didn’t understand it myself, but I had learned that it was true. “They are afraid of what is written with the brush. This is why artists are jailed.”
He looked blank.
“They are afraid of years to come,” I said. “They are afraid that eyes from another time will look back and judge them for the way we are. Did you pass the Punishment Grounds? The heads on poles, the flayed corpses on their wooden beams?”
“Yes, we did. Our guards said the display was to make us feel safe.”
“Lucky you didn’t see Hokusai amongst those remains,” I joked.
“You exaggerate.”
“No,” I said as simply and as firmly as I was able. “You have not felt the awful power of Japan pressed down on you.” And in my mind I thought, Not yet you haven’t. I prayed he never did. “We sometimes also think the Shogun is sleeping.”
Von Siebold’s long, deep-set eyes flickered, but he smiled still. He felt he was above suspicion.
As we sat, envoys were discussing the shrinking copper trade. Doctors were gathering to make a presentation about acupuncture. These conversations were not known to anyone. They did not have a material being, so he did not have to keep them in his luggage. He said things into the air. He believed they dissipated like fog, like the spray off the waterfalls.
“I never did meet your father,” said von Siebold, seeking my eyes as if through them he could see into my heart. He took one of my small hands between his two large, white hands. “But perhaps I have met the better part of the painting team.”