I was alone. I made my dolls. I did the odd bit of work for a temple. I took to praying at the women’s temple, though I drew the line at sticking pins into cubes of tofu. For months I heard little of him, only that he had walked all the way to the distant mountains of Nagano. There, he had chanced upon the estate of an art patron and samurai called Takai Kozan, and he had been given shelter, and even work.
Then he reappeared. He stayed part of the year and then left again. I was alone.
The Eighteen
TODAY A LONG LETTER ARRIVED
. The plea from Hokusai was clear: “Come to me. I need you, Chin-Chin. Kozan has made us a little house by a stream.”
“My father is asking for me,” I told the vendor of the best noodles in our quarter. I sucked in the soba. The next stall had silvery broiled fish on skewers, very salty. Farther along was eggplant smeared with sweet miso paste.
The fish man grunted and gave me two skewers. The vegetable man was not keen to part with anything from his wooden trays, but he did. The sake vendor’s blazing placards and rude spouts tempted me, but I went past. I was heading to the storyteller at Senso-ji temple. I had become friendly with this man. He was grizzled and dishevelled. I sat beside him on his mat.
“My father asks for me in Obuse. He cannot do the work without me. I’m not surprised. He is in his eighty-sixth year. Decent men, respectable men, are dead in their fiftieth.”
“Hmmph. So, so,” hiccuped Yasayuke, waving away his tobacco smoke. That combined with the incense from the burner almost, but not quite, covered the odour of his kimono. It was stiff with earth and sweat. “You are an old woman yourself.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. When you have an old father, you cannot be old; you must be young.”
He accepted my offer of a skewer of fish.
“He wants me to go to him.”
I pulled a thin, rectangular box out of my basket. It was the size of my forearm. I unpacked the tiny figures made of clay, painted with the deep colours anyone could recognize as my own—deep tea, crimson, the orangey red called beni, dark green, and several shades of blue. I stood them in order on the lid of their box. It was a procession of the castle guards. Rounded and armed, they represented flag bearers, officials, samurai, and even the Shogun himself, although no doubt there was a law against it. But he was so small, only the size of the last joint of my little finger. This is what I was reduced to.
“These are the original keshi ningyo dolls! Accept no substitute!” I called out to the passersby.
“No one will buy that one,” said the storyteller. “It’s gruesome. Make a nice marriage procession.”
As I sunk my teeth into one blackened bit of fish and tore it off, a woman came to stare at my dolls.
“How much do they cost?”
“Five mon.”
She looked with longing. The procession was not beautiful, but it was true. I had seen it. She had seen it too—men with placards naming their crimes, guards with wooden staffs, the ruler wide on his sedan chair. I watched her idly as she wavered. Could she afford it? I kept chewing. I made no attempt to persuade her. And she moved on.
I passed the letter over to Yasayuke.
There was more writing after my father’s, by the rice merchant himself, inviting me to share the mountain refuge with my father. I was to travel with the merchant caravan Juhachi-ya, the Eighteen. Kozan had got me a transit visa to pass through the sekisho, the checkpoints on the route. It said I was the daughter of Koyama-san, owner of Juhachi-ya. The final line of the letter was this: a warm travelling cloak would be waiting for me at his shop in Edo.
“He has provided for me, and I am to drop everything to get there.”
“What is there to drop?”
“Everything! The North Star Studio, our commissions, my students, keshi ningyo dolls . . .”
There was something else. I had a new and very young friend. Her name was Tachi, and she was my niece, the daughter of my brother Sakujiro. Sakujiro had gone up in the world as we had gone down. He now worked in the counting houses of the Shogun. His wife disapproved of me, but the little girl came to visit when she could.
“If you are robbed and killed,” my friend said, his misbehaving eye smiling, “I will tell the story. You will enter legend this way.” The storyteller had been all around Japan. That was one reason he was so popular. He could describe the wild valleys and the splashing waterfalls, and he could whistle like the birds that hid in the tops of ancient cedars.
I laughed with him. “I have already entered legend. I am the devoted daughter of the Old Man Mad about Painting. I am Iitsu, the secret brush. I am ‘She who paints but does not sew.’ And now I am to be disguised as a merchant’s daughter.”
“You’ll talk like this.” He put on his female voice; he drew a cloak over his head, pulled in his chin. He simpered in high tones. “I must travel from Edo to our home in the mountains because my old father is ill. I am not harmful to anyone.”
Then he jumped to his feet and leered down at me, a bakufu guard at the post station. “Where is your husband?”
Again the cloak transformed his face.
“I have no husband. What man would marry me? I am strange.” He allowed a little drool to escape the side of his mouth and crossed his eyes.
He puffed himself up. “The woman is simple. Let her pass.”
But it was just a game. I knew how to speak like a merchant’s daughter: I taught such women every day. I was not afraid. But I resolved to ask my brother if I could take Tachi with me. She could speak for me. I knew the girl was curious about the outside world. He would say yes, not because he wanted to please me or even her, but because he was a snob, and we would be visiting a respectable samurai family, a rich man.
I
PULLED TAKAI KOZAN’S LETTER
out of my kimono. The head carter read it, looked me over, and gave one short, sharp nod. Kozan was the boss, and this was the cargo he wanted.
He cast a scant look at little Tachi, wrapped and still beside me.
“My daughter,” I said.
The oxen were bellowing and thick-skinned and black with road dirt. The men who drove them were no different. One of them lifted me and plopped me in the cart. I would ride with the brass temple bell and the bales of silk and the farm implements. Tachi was lifted beside me. She sat on a pile of books and prints with a wrapper from Ichibee, the rangaku bookseller.
My plain indigo kimono was hidden under a thick cloak. My head was wrapped in the scarf Kozan supplied. We approached the checkpoint. When I was a child I passed here disguised as a boy; now I passed as a samurai woman.
We travelled beside the coast. I gazed at the waves, remembering my father jumping in the foam. I told stories to Tachi. At night we came to a post station and pulled up at an inn. We two went off to a room of our own, our bodies cramped and sore.
We began to follow a river upstream. Fuji, the Peerless Cone, was on my left hand. Then it was gone and the black, jagged rows of rock stood up, sawtoothed and vehement. Through the gaps we saw white peaks. The men sang oxen songs. I learned to arrange the bales so my bones remained intact despite the jogging.
This was the world beyond Edo. This was what the people longed to see.
Even now, in late March, there were patches of snow. The sky was beru, and the wind was a melody from the samisen of a sad courtesan. Down and up the old trail went, full of stones that had been turned by hooves. We came to Magome, a staging town. Shops stuttered up beside the steep road, selling straw sandals and wooden kitchen tools. I bought a pair of sandals. At a bookshop I saw a fake Hokusai print with thick lines, bad colour, and blocks that were not aligned. Years before, we had an apprentice we called Dog Hokusai. Apparently he was still at work: his forgeries sold in the country, while my father and I could not get work in Edo.
We passed a wheel with a thick tongue of water turning it. The men pointed: “Snow is melting on the mountaintops.” We stopped to eat tofu broiled in brown sugar and noodle soup with mountain vegetables. Houseboys from the inns offered prostitutes. Juhachi-ya didn’t stop. Priests and pilgrims gathered at crossroads. The Eighteen shouted for them to make way for our wide and implacable beasts.
After this town we would come to the steepest part, the pass.
“Strange Daughter,” the carters called, “you can get down from the cart now.”
Tachi jumped down too. The sandals were good and my feet flattened out to meet the stones. The men sang and we marked time by hitting the side of the cart. Bearers passed, going the other way. Far away, farmers worked in their fields, which were narrow, snake-like, between ridges. A sashiba, a grey eagle, flapped in a tree above my head. It chased a smaller bird and seized it. Up and up and up.
My chest began to heave.
“Nearly at the top,” one of the men grunted.
We sat on a stone bench, four men and Ei and a child. A waitress came out of a tiny hut to serve us tea. It was familiar to me, and then I knew. My father had drawn this scene: the delicate waitress, the teashop verandah perched over the edge of the steep cliff, the blue hills far off and green ones nearby, and the road beaten flat as a silk ribbon heading through the trees. He had come before us. We were in his footsteps.
Now the path curved along the edge of a hill. Beside us was empty space.
“Ooooh!” Tachi and I held on to each other.
There was a wall of trees growing far down the hill on one side; the sun pushed through the high branches and scattered rays at our feet. The curve was long and spectacular; I felt as if I were walking around the balcony of a giant theatre. The treetops swayed like heads in a crowd of thousands. Plumes of bamboo leaned and sighed in the wind. What was to come? What was to come? The path sloped a little and then a little more. My sandals slapped and slapped harder as my weight pushed me downhill.
I steadied myself against the cart. This was the world and I had only had reports of it before. I had only mixed its colours before. I saw the fat groom brushing the fatter samurai horse beside the inn; the carpenter dropping his tool in the water as he tried to fix the narrow wooden bridge. I imagined my father sleeping in the pine needles. I saw Hiroshige with his sketch pad, remote and serene, sketching the distant views.
We reached the top of the pass. The road went down from here, in both directions. I listened to the wind. The men untied the oxen. They put their headscarves in the stream and tied them on again.
“Going down is the hard part. Keep out of the way.”
They tightened their belts. They got in front of the cart, shoulders pressed to the boards.
The goods slid forward. The bushels strained against their straps and the barrels rumbled on the wood. The load had been heavy to bring up, and now it wanted down in a hurry. The hindquarters of the oxen snapped from side to side. The carters hopped behind the cart, using their weight to pull it backwards so it didn’t break its traces and crash into the oxen. When the path curved, the cart veered to one edge or the other. The carters swore and leapt and hung from the covered wagon.
Tachi and I ran behind.
The oxen plodded on, seeming not to notice the mad dance, the loud protests from the wooden wheels, the dragging and hopping of the men to keep the cart in the track. The men stopped and wet their foreheads. They swore and drank water and started again.
We came to the Spirit Trees. This was a famous place. There were two trees here that were inhabited by spirits. One was the vengeful ghost of a woman who was murdered. The other was her husband, who was the guilty party. For all the caravans, it was the place of resting. There was a small inn and an onsen, a hot spring.
The sun was slashing horizontally through the bare tree trunks by this time. The carters took off their harnesses, and the oxen were sent to the stable. The Eighteen were known here. The lead carter explained that I was “an item due to Koyama. His daughter, they say.” Large wink.
“More like his mother.”
The innkeepers exclaimed with delight over Tachi and took her off to the kitchen for food. I heard them singing and laughing. The carters began to drink and the prostitutes arrived, bringing mountain soba with mushrooms. I ate my noodles alone, sucking them up loudly. The innkeeper watched over me. The sun disappeared behind the hills, and the trees were now in darkness.
There was a strange welling in my chest, as if I had been struck on the breastbone. This feeling had come several times since I got my father’s letter. I never wept. At home, in the dark studio with my father, tears were like jewels; they glittered, out of place, a luxury from another sort of life. But this huge, black place welcomed them. I wiped my face with my sleeves. I smelled the cool damp of the earth.
Half a dozen carters went to the bath. I half-saw them scrub themselves over hot stones with little cloths. In the velvet darkness they climbed into the water. They lay with their heads back and their feet stretched out in the pool. They let out gusty cries of exhaustion.
“Come and join us, Katsushika Oei,” they said.
They knew my painting name?
“You are the daughter of the famous Old Man. Come and join us. We will greet the gods in the middle of the night.”