I was drawn back down to the poorer streets, to the brothels alongside the moat where, as the sun set, women arranged themselves behind the lattice. There was such heaviness in their movements despite their youth, despite their thinness. They tended one another nervously, a flock of birds. I shuddered at the strange animation that came over one of them when a client came close to the slats and beckoned. In the low lamplight, the dark pickets of the fence laid black lines across the women’s bodies. Their faces were heavily whitened, their cheeks slack with boredom, and from their piled-up hair the clutch of pins, the bin-sashi, stuck out like spokes on a crazy wheel. Shino—lost Shino—had taught us to ward off attacks with these hairpins. I could still remember the steps to that “dance.”
Mune, who not only patronized my studio but also introduced her friends for lessons, had begun to bring me commissions for scroll paintings of women of the Yoshiwara. She and her elderly mother, Hokumei, acted as go-betweens; I did not know who the art lovers were who bought these pieces. It was mysterious and entirely anonymous, but when a commission came it was with ample money for paint and gold, and I delighted in the work. I came here to watch, but I drew nothing until I was at home alone. Courtesans reading by starlight, courtesans behind the lattice—these were my favourite subjects. I used no subtlety in colour: the black was black and the lit area was glaring white, nowhere to hide. I painted the onlookers from the back, with their dark wraps concealing their faces, and beyond them the watched women melting under high, bright lanterns.
What sort of people were we to invent this class of woman solely formed to please a man? I had asked the Dutch doctor that. Now I asked the question again, to anyone who would see, in my paintings. Who were we to force them to be supplicant? To sit on display rolled in bales of fabric and skin caked white like parched earth. To sleep until noon and work all night, tending men. To speak and move and even think like children, like the possessions they were. Who were we to distort lives this way?
I could not watch without thinking of the brave and fragile Shino, who had been my sister and my mother, as my blood sisters and mother had failed to be. Her spirit had carried her through even this ritual of the lattice and into marriage—and away from me. No doubt the blind man took good care of her. Could she bear his ham hands on her? His fat, stuffed fingers probing? And what did she make of his sightless intensity, so different from my father and his laughing, all-seeing eyes?
Mitsu, font of all gossip, had reported that the blind man had succeeded as a moneylender.
“He has an excellent clientele, you wone beleeve,” she had said to me, winking at Eisen. “That woman’s living high up on the hill now. Climbing back to where she came from—but this time ther’z no noble familee, only money, keeping her there. Izn it?”
It had been many years now. Twenty years, when I counted. I had lived an entire lifetime. I supposed I was nothing to her. The child of her secret lover, a lover whom she was forced to abandon, and who had abandoned her. My father remembered her, I knew: he had no other woman. She had forgotten us, doubtless. We moved so often, nearly every year. We kept the wanted as well as the unwanted off our trail.
B
ut one day, as if I had conjured her, I saw her.
I was strolling a narrow canal behind Yoshida Street, a moody backwater near Nihonbashi. There was a deserted washhouse on a platform where local people came to wash vegetables and do laundry. Beside it was a noodle house where I sometimes bought soba from a dogged husband and wife who kept their business going despite a dearth of customers. But this day I found they had gone out of business.
I walked slowly by their premises. A blue-uniformed policeman waved his baton—get along—and then saluted. It was in an empty house like this that the last big fire in the Yoshiwara had begun, only a few years ago. That explained his presence.
I stopped at the tiny bridge that crossed the still canal. It was evening, and the moon was high. It slipped between the rooftops and lay on the still water, giving a little light to this dark place.
I saw a woman come out of the doorway and begin to walk along the path, close to the wall. She was wrapped in a cloak and quick as a cat, but her long, straight back caught my eye. Before I thought about it, my lips were speaking.
“Shino!”
She did not turn around. She did not stop, but slowed just perceptibly.
“Shino! It’s me, Ei.”
“I know,” she said. “One does not forget that voice.”
I understood then that she had been avoiding us.
“Don’t you want to look at me?” I said softly. I was so much older now, thirty-seven. That meant she would be forty-seven. She walked like a girl. “Have I angered you?”
She looked away, towards the lighted, busy streets. She reached into her sleeve as if looking for something. “Don’t stop here,” she said. “You’ll give us away.”
Give who away to whom? I did not understand. She was free, and probably wealthy.
“Walk past,” she commanded.
I walked past, a few feet from her body.
“My husband doesn’t know I’m here.”
I felt a surge of my old hatred of this blind man.
“But can we meet?”
“Not tonight. Come tomorrow. I’ll take precautions. Go to the house you saw me leave, at twilight. Cover your head. There will be candles. Follow them.”
A
s I approached the narrow canal, I noticed that the little noodle house I had thought abandoned had a shingle. It read, “The Sign of the Nighthawk.” The window papers glowed: there was candlelight within. I put my face near the door and scratched, and said a soft “Good evening.”
The door opened. Eight female heads turned in shock.
“It’s all right,” said Shino.
She stood amongst a clutch of haggard women. They were seated on old sake barrels. They held mirrors, and the tongues of candle flame reflected off the surfaces around the room, like yellow birds. She wore an apron. She hardly looked at me. With a paintbrush and a pot of rice powder she was buffing the cheeks of a woman much the worse for wear.
“Pardon me for the secrecy,” she said pleasantly. “But as the prostitutes are illegal, helping them is illegal too. My husband does not approve.”
I saw faces scarred, toothless, and pockmarked—blemishes that were indeed the sign of the nighthawks. But they were laughing and flushed; there was heat in the room from a charcoal burner. Shino’s helper was making rosebud lips out of narrow, lined mouths. One woman took softened wax from a candle, shaped it between her thumb and fingers, and set it on her nose, the end of which had been eaten away, I supposed by syphilis. She patted away with her wax, adding bits, squeezing with her thumb. I wondered how it would stay on.
“So this is your vice,” I said, taking refuge in the rough irony that was my father’s. “Good works. I knew you’d still be misbehaving.”
“Nor have you lost your edge,” she said.
I wanted to take her in my arms and embrace her. But eight women with half-made faces listened.
Shino’s long face was fuller and she had stopped hiding her strength: her gaze was frank and humorous and to the point. Her married status still surprised me, the shaved eyebrows and blackened teeth. Her hair had gone from its deep, rich black to grey—grey at the top of her head and over her ears, black in the large, loose knot.
“It suits you, married life,” I admitted. “Though I still feel, after all this time, unfairly cut out of it.”
“It was not my wish,” she said. “But necessary.”
To cut my father out, yes. But me? Why me? Was the blind man so vindictive? I didn’t ask.
“Are you happy?” We both said it at the same time. Our audience of haggard and half-made faces laughed. It was strange speaking in front of them, but I could see Shino would not be moved from her task.
“I am very happy,” she said.
“I too. And your esteemed husband?” I said without a trace of irony.
“He remains well, the gods willing. And your father?”
“The Old Man is often on the road. He has had success with his Thirty-six Views of Mt. Fuji and is in excellent health despite his years.”
“Astonishing,” murmured Shino, “and I would love to hear more about you. But the women must get ready. They need to be out for the evening soon.”
The woman who was trying to fill the hole in her nose called out for help. But Shino was doing hair, rolling tangled lanks of it and pinning it up. I stepped in, and that was how I found myself rolling tiny bits of warm wax and plugging them into an eroded nose. When I was finished, both the nighthawk and I were pleased.
“You’re good with a brush. Draw some lips—make them tiny and red.”
I supposed the women had once been beautiful, at least beautiful enough to sell themselves. Now they could not practise in a brothel. Shino helped make them presentable enough to catch a client on the street for a few small coins. When they left, cheerfully enough, for their evening’s work, I sat on a rice caddy and took the tea she offered.
“They’ll eat tomorrow,” she said.
“You keep them working,” I observed.
“If they had any choice, they wouldn’t be doing it. And every day brings hope—the makeup brings hope.”
I listened. Shino’s eyes were glowing. She had plans: she was trying to convince a brothel owner to let her open a hospital.
“Please excuse the drama of our little subterfuge. But my husband sometimes has me watched.”
I supposed that he was ashamed she had been a courtesan.
“No,” she said, “it’s because he gets his licence from the Shogun. I endanger him with the work. My friendship with you would be even worse. The North Star Studio is always under suspicion. Hokusai paints in the Western way. He sold to foreigners.”
“You’re not afraid to help the nighthawks, but you are afraid to see us?” I was wounded, and tears came to my eyes.
“I haven’t forgotten you,” she said. “I buy every little piece of work you do—a print or a handbook, even the shunga.”
“Under my father’s signature?” I said.
“I know the difference.”
I
REFUSED TO ACCEPT SHINO’S BAN
. I went past the little house now and then. I drew rosebud mouths in crimson, and with a tiny razor I cleaned up the napes of women who needed hair to grow in the two points that marked a virgin. She always pushed me out of there as quickly as she could. The last time she was truly angry with me.
“I said you must not come!”
I stayed away for a long time. When, months later, I walked along the narrow canal, I saw that the house was dark. The Sign of the Nighthawk was gone.
And there were no more commissions for paintings of Yoshiwara Beauties. The fashion then was for Chinese legends—safe subjects, nothing to do with the regime. I was lucky to find a rich patron who wanted one.
Apology
I WAS ALONE IN THE NORTH STAR STUDIO
when Matsudaira Sadanobu came to visit. He was old and fat. His retainers filled the doorway and frightened my neighbours. He bowed in humble fashion and asked for my father.
“I never know where the Old Man is. He is on his travels,” I said shortly.
“Your father was beloved by Shogun and commoner alike,” began Sadanobu.
“Ah, but apparently not by those in between,” said I, “the administrators, the councillors, the censors?”
“Yes, by all. We all loved him.”
I took note of the past tense. Did this man know something that I didn’t? I called for the neighbour’s boy to get us tea.
“I am a writer,” said Sadanobu, warming a little. “I understand the difficult life of the artist.”
“Oh, yes. I recall your written works,” I said as we waited. “There was that famous line you wrote in the edict announcing the Kansei Reforms: ‘There have been books since times long past and no more are necessary.’”
He flushed. “That was long ago. Force was needed to save the people. The city had become decadent. History will judge us. I did not want to leave such art as you people created on the record.”
“You were afraid of history.”
“But I understand that my actions created harsh times for writers and artists. I have come to offer my apologies.”
Apologies? We were not ready for them.
“I understand that Hokusai is not well. I myself am near to death. I would like to see him before I die.”
Hokusai was going to die? Was that the rumour?
I retorted: “Hokusai will outlive you. He has already outlived two wives and all my sisters. They died in their twenties, but that is the life of the poor, is it not? He may even outlive me.”
Sadanobu endured my cold words.
“If you seek forgiveness,” I told him, “better to go to your temple. You will not find it here.”
“I want to undo the wrongs I have done in this world before I leave it.”
“Only a man of exceptional arrogance could even imagine that was possible,” I said.
His voice rose alarmingly. “You hold on to the past. That’s not what your Buddha preaches. I loved your father, as I loved the other artists and writers.”