White Butterflies
I STOPPED WITH MUNE
at her home on the way out of Edo. After two nights, I left.
I set off very early in the morning. As always, I put the Hokusai seal in my sleeve, along with my brushes. I took my case of pigments. I rolled my paintings that I had stored there into a cloth bag. I had my long bo for a walking stick.
Totsuka was the sixth stop on the Tokaido. With luck I could be there by nightfall. The inn was a big one—rustic, unprepossessing. Hiroshige had made a print of it in his Tokaido series. I might indeed, to amuse myself, stay there; although I had invented Bunzo’s commission.
In the print, the inn was a friendly place, its thatch roof overhanging the wooden verandah just steps off the road. A carved grey milepost marking the Tokaido was beside it. A stone lantern marked the foot of a small humped bridge. A waitress stood in front, welcoming. It was obvious that Eisen drew her, when he was working with Hiroshige. She was short even on her raised clogs, with the large head that was his style.
In the centre of the print was the back end of the horse (a steal from Hokusai); the horse’s tail blew sideways in the wind. The arriving travellers were hunched as the wind struck their backs, an inshore wind off the sea.
Totsuka was a flat, marshy place, but just beyond it a steep hill rose straight up from the water. Over the bridge, the road wandered into dark woods. Despite the friendly inn with its beckoning waitress, the place was forlorn; the ocean beyond was fine on a sunny day but harsh in winter.
I took a ride in a cart. Then I walked. I had made good time; it was still afternoon when I saw the inn ahead. Bunzo would welcome me with a room and a meal.
But as I approached I felt the cold, clammy air of the tomb. I saw horses being led around the back. I thought I spied Tsuyuki. But why would he be there? Suddenly the scene—the open door, the bright banners, the beckoning waitress with the head of an Eisen courtesan—made me cold.
It is not for nothing I am called a witch.
It was the twelfth year after the earthquake of 1855. In the Western calendar, 1867. I was sixty-seven years old. My hand went into my sleeve pocket and curled around the Hokusai seal. I hesitated. I had a little more daylight.
I made a sudden change of plan.
I turned back. Ugly clouds arose, and in minutes there was a rainstorm. It was a bombardment, as if the world were angry that I had escaped. The drops clattered on my umbrella and smacked on the path. As I walked the clouds blew off. It was clear and cold.
I took the steep path to Kamakura. I began to climb before noon. I had not seen Shino for fifteen years. My life had not been easy during these times. I was rougher, I knew. But I did not doubt her loyalty.
Here, in the high land above the seafront, weather moved across the earth like lightning. The day had begun with rain, but now the sun shone. I entered the clean brightness of an alpine meadow. My winding path led across it. It was like a pathway in a dream. After the storm it felt fresh, yet ancient.
I came to a field of white butterflies.
There was some brambly bush that they liked. They lifted up and settled again, like soft feathers above open mouths. The bushes were breathing.
The white butterflies were everywhere; they opened to circles and folded to thin lines. Against the mountains, stopped and stoic and ragged, they looked so frail, so light.
The beauty of it made me long to live.
I saw an old man, silhouetted, his childlike dark form with all its concentrated energy on a log bench in that wide upland meadow.
It was Hokusai.
My bo hit the path with each alternate step—click, click. My backpack jingled. The Old Man did not hear me. He was engaged. He was waving his arms, and his face was fierce with concentration. He was conducting a butterfly symphony. They fluttered from all parts of his amphitheatre. Around him in the green hummocks and hollows of the meadow were flowers—wild asters and anemones and alpine forget-me-nots.
The meadow spread around us—open, spongy, a little salty from the sea below. A golden eagle looped above, dove for a squirrel but was defeated by the cloud of butterflies.
They were under the baton of the Old Man.
I paused at the edge of this frame. It was worthy of his best.
He waved this side in, then he signalled that side out. He had them rising, dispersing. He closed off this section with a tight circle of his hands. Then he closed off the other. He leaned back with his stick between his legs and closed his eyes and smiled. His butterflies subsided, but not entirely. They mustered for a second act.
“Old Man!” I called. “How about it?”
He roused himself, lifted his right hand, and broke into uproarious laughter. The squirrel squeaked and ran in sequences from one hideout to another, and the eagle’s shadow drew figures only he could have created.
He did not turn his head. “Chin-Chin, I do not see you. But I know your voice.”
“Have you lost your sight, Old Man? Come back as a blind man?”
“I have not lost my sight. I have used it up. I used up enough sight for five lives. But I am happy. For sure I got no rest until it was gone. I was so tired of seeing!”
“Are you quite well? Do you need me? I will come to be with you,” I said.
“So you will, Chin-Chin. But not yet. It isn’t time! Go on, go on.”
And then I couldn’t see him anymore.
The path ran above and alongside the ocean. Below me seawater, thick with roiled sand, pushed against the cliff. Trees shot straight up from their precarious holds on the side of the bank.
I passed an inn. I had tea and rice cakes. I kept on walking, across a causeway.
The weed was mica yellow. The water was aqua blue, the sky pale and flecked with cloud. Now I could see Fuji. The face of the mountain was stolid and unmoving.
It was a long walk and I had time to think. Things I wished to tell him: about tigers, which to my father had been imaginary. I had painted him as a tiger in the snow and then a tiger in the rain, without ever having seen one. Now that Japan was trading with the world, two tigers had been imported and sold. This was in the Yokohama newspaper. They sat in cages. Not nearly so exciting as ours had been. Our fantasies were being pulled in like kites that had lost their wind.
I would bring this and other news to Shino. She would greet me with palpable joy. I would present my work, which I trusted her to keep. We would go to the hot springs together. The Temple of Refuge would be my refuge again; it would be my Obuse—safe and still—where I could prepare for the end.
Assassins roamed the country these days. But no one was on this stretch of road. I shrugged off the dark feeling that had come over me at Totsuka. I was not in danger; I was no one, with only a little money and my brushes. The stone seal was a weight deep in my kimono sleeve.
I came to the gate. No one greeted me. The hill was steep. I thought of the time years ago when I had run here to get my divorce. I had gone all the way in deep snow and not felt the hill. Now I felt it. At last I saw nuns.
“Old woman!” they said. “Come and rest.”
“I will be most glad to do so,” I said, instantly adopting the cultured sound that Shino had tried to give me. “I am an old friend of the abbess. Could you tell her that Oei is here?”
Shino walked with a cane and did not seem surprised to see me. She was ancient. Her beloved face was long and full of light.
“You have come,” she said. “What a perfect afternoon.”
“Yes, it is,” I said, “now that I have found you.” I had the impulse to bow at her feet, a rare one for me, and I did it. She touched my head.
“You’ve walked a long way. You look like that turtle again, the way you did when you were a child on his shoulder.”
“I was going to another place, but I turned back.”
“Why?”
“Because I need to prepare.”
We had a meal and then she said she would show me some treasures. “We have many things of value here in the temple,” she said. “They are here for safekeeping.”
She took me to a series of rooms. It was dark, so she raised a lantern.
Once, when I was young and we briefly had a little prosperity, my father gave a painting party. He collected his works and pinned them to the walls, where they beamed their grace and light.
Now here were my works, deep with colour and longing. Never before had I seen them together: the Chinese legends, the boy viewing Mt. Fuji from the arm of the willow tree, the prints and paintings on scrolls, and the picture books—my Book of Tea and my Illustrated Manual for Women—even the shunga.
“You?” I said. “You were the patron?”
“Not always.”
We walked around together, looking, and Shino asking, remarking on this and that.
There was Girl Composing a Poem under the Cherry Blossoms at Night. It had been a commission that came through Mune. It was a courtesan with a brush in her hand. The stars were twinkling in the dark sky.
“I can see why you loved to paint the prostitutes, like this one. Men have taken some broken pleasure in her helplessness. But still she will never be conquered.”
I said. “I understood a little of what it was to be a slave.”
Shino sighed. “All humans are slaves. I grant you that women have no freedom, except those freedoms men allow them. But men themselves are the playthings of gods. They may run the world. But in the end, the world is an illusion and their power is smoke.”
“I suppose,” I said doubtfully.
She drew her finger along the plume of smoke that rose behind Mt. Fuji in the painting where the dragon is disappearing.
“You know that already,” she said.
I took out my pipe case. It was my favourite possession, black lacquer, decorated with leaves of grass. I withdrew the narrow wooden pipe with its small silver bowl, its iron stem, its gold band. I undid the metal closing in the shape of a snail and opened my tobacco case. I took up a taper to light it; it flared sweetly in the dark room.
This was a conversation we had had before.
“New ways are coming,” I told her. “I have seen over the horizon. There is another way for women.”
“You have seen this?”
“I have.”
A puff on my pipe made me brave.
“Here’s something else I have begun to think: Hokusai was a good painter, but he was no great master. That was a fantasy we all subscribed to. Just someone we needed to believe in.”
“He was ordinary and he loved the ordinary, and that was his rare, rare gift. His goodness came in spite of himself.”
We argued as we always had. We debated celebrity, which had been the obsession of our age, the ideal we promoted with our prints, and the way we little people of Japan had asserted our rights. We all wanted a little bit of it, and so we strove to improve. Vanity—had it not been a force for the good?
No, no, said the abbess. How sickening was the idea of worldly greatness, in the truest sense, Shino told me. She said it led to corruption of the soul and of all the gifts. It was the root of all noise and distraction, all vanity. It did not bring peace. It looked good only from the distance. All this I listened to and nodded my head and drew in tobacco and pondered.
But beauty, I protested. Was that different? The goal of every painting I made. What was that for? What was its power? Was it simply for pleasure? Or was it something deeper, something spiritual? It had been my grail. I had followed it because it was within my grasp, at least on the page.
She didn’t have answers. They don’t, these nuns.
I
slept in a small room near my paintings. They were such company! The work of my years. I thought about my father and the butterflies. I thought about his simplicity, his joy, and envied it. Bullies do end up being joyful more often than the bullied. It’s not fair.
In the morning I told Shino that I would die soon. I had seen the heads of many men pressed together, moved by one emotion, watching one spot. I was the object of their attention, and it was frightening.
“One must be ready to die at any time,” said Shino.
Sometimes it’s frustrating to have a nun as a friend.
“Teach me to believe,” I said. “I want to live forever. You know the idea: after a series of dialogues with a virtuous nun, I will become enlightened and never die.”
“You too?” Shino laughed. She thought she had caught me out. But I was ready for her.
“Not like my father. He may keep his immortality. He had no peace. I heard him die, and with the last rattle he was begging for just one more year, one more so his art could become perfect. My desire is different,” I told her. “I want stillness. I want cats.”
“Cats?”
“I want permanence of colour. No fading. And no putrefaction! Promise me.” The decomposition of the body appalled me. They studied it so assiduously, those nuns—all nine stages of it, in gruesome detail. They seemed to take pleasure in that. “Do you remember? In the little temple in the woods above Kyoto?” They had to memorize the nine stages of decay. They went from “newly deceased” to “distension” to “rupture.” There were pictures and details of each. There was “exudation of blood” and after that, with a poem, “discolouration and desiccation.” So muddying! Later came “putrefaction” and “consumption by birds and animals.” I didn’t mind that so much. But what about “suppuration”? There was consumption by worms and “shrinkage into a bundle of firewood.”