“I wonder how he got
that
gig? No matter. They’ll get him for it.”
I went outside. I stood in shadow between the ovals of lantern light spilling on the outside wall of the
ageya.
I hoped I was invisible.
At first I thought about the blind masseur who visited the Corner Tamaya and gave Shino fish. I never hid my dislike of him. But he had saved my father from making bigger mistakes than usual by dragging him off the stage.
Why did he do that? He couldn’t have been a fan of his art. It must have been for Shino. So the blind man must have known that my father was important to Shino. How important? What did he know? Did he know me?
A kind act from this loathsome man could only be explained by one thing: he loved her. So much, even, that he looked out for his rival?
I did not understand love. Apart from my mother, who had no time for me, prostitutes and artists were the adults I knew. For them, everything was backward. Duty filled their day, and love was what they bought when they had money. Many wished for the opposite to be true. Shino was sad, but she had hope. She would pay her debt. Others seemed to enjoy the backward life and just went on and on.
Hokusai, although a man and technically free, was imprisoned too. I knew he loved our thin, goose-necked, long-nosed, sad-faced girl-woman. I loved her too. But he could not have her. It wasn’t because he had a wife. It was because he did not have money. He earned money, sometimes, but it flew out of our hands; I did not know how. Had Hokusai given up? Is that why he pretended to be carefree? Had Shino accepted it too? Maybe my father was not a rival to the blind man. Maybe—awful thought—the blind man felt sorry for my father. Maybe he had the compassion that Shino always said I lacked.
Hokusai would never truly accept the backward rules of love, I thought. Hokusai couldn’t do that. He was restless.
And restless was dangerous.
I shifted farther from the door to the
ageya,
passing the well of light, finding the next patch of darkness. My father could not accept rules. One day he would get too tired to pretend, and he would go mad and break all the rules. Perhaps even today.
I was cold. The new year should bring spring. But this one had come with snow on pine branches and glittering ice underfoot. The moat winked in the darkness between the rows of brothels. It was a deep blue, almost black: the lamplight did not reach the water. There was a narrow curve of moon above it. And as I stared, I realized that I had found my father. He was sitting in the fork of a tree.
He looked small, like a boy who could no longer stand all his friends’ bullying. He was yearning toward the dark, toward the place where it was silent, where no voice baited him. I started toward him and then stopped. That man Sanba was in my path.
“What do you suppose Hokusai is doing?”
“He’s worshipping,” I said.
“The moon?”
“No, the North Star. Myoken. The writers’ star. The star of the brush. It is one of the seven stars that make the Great Dipper. There.” I whispered, pointed; then I saw that he knew; he was teasing me.
“I didn’t know your father was a worshipping man.”
“Of course he is. We go often to his temple at Yanagishima in Honjo, where he was born,” I said, amused that Sanba would not know so obvious a thing.
Away from the row of lanterns the stars became brighter. There was smoke in the air; they did not hold still. They were intense, but they flickered. They were covered. Then, in a moment of clear air, they emerged overhead in waves and currents, like graceful brushstrokes of light through the dark sky.
He caught my hand. “Let’s not disturb him,” said Sanba. “It’s a good hiding place.”
But I wanted to.
“Father!” I said. “Old Man!”
“Hey, you. Oooo-eei,” he replied, without surprise, or regret that he had left me, and without turning his head. “Come and look.”
I loosened Sanba’s hand. “Thank you,” I said. “You can go now.”
I climbed the tree and tucked myself in at the Old Man’s side. We stared at the dark sky as the night went on.
I was a ghoulish child. It was the company I kept. But I was not gloomy; it was a glittery, feverish fascination with ghosts I had. I watched everyone flirt with death. I was always excited. I was difficult to tame; my spirits were high.
But that night of the new year I was wary.
I searched for one beautiful thing on which to focus my mind. And I could find nothing. Not the cherry blossoms on the boulevard—they were planted only for their blooming season, and then they were ripped out. I bled for those trees, that they could not put down roots. The yellow flowers too were hastened into bloom. Soon after, their thin stalks collapsed and they died.
Not Shino’s long, inquisitive face and fluting voice: no, now when I saw her face I thought of her in the Hour of the Ox, when she rose from her mattress, dark circles under her eyes, a washboard of bones visible on her chest where the kimono fell open, holding a lighted taper.
“Tie up your kimono,” I would whisper. “You look so cold.”
Her chin drooped and her hair overwhelmed its spiky pins and pulled to the side of her head. Her red undergarments showed around her ankles. If I showed pity, it made her angry.
“Don’t you pity me! ” she chided.
My father said I was not to feel fear, and she said I should not feel pity. What could I feel, then? Anger. I felt it, but I could not hold on to it. If I felt nothing, what did that make me? A ghost?
This thought was agitating, and I twisted away from it, nearly falling from the crook of our tree. Then I found it interesting and tried to get it back.
Perhaps I really was a ghost. How long had I been one? Who else was a ghost? Was my father? He was angry, yes, as he’d shown tonight, but his anger died. Then he was sad. Was it because he made things beautiful that were not, in truth, beautiful? And he did it so well! Beauty that pulled at the cords of the heart, the cords that ran down the back of the throat, beneath words, beyond words, straight to tears. That beauty owned him. It replaced flesh and blood. He would deny all of us and himself to serve that beauty.
I had always known it. I had learned in his arms. This art and the need to make it was stronger than love. But each time I saw the god of art win, I had to learn again. And painfully.
Myoken was his master. His master said he need not eat when others ate. He need not sleep when they slept. He need not paint what other people wanted. He must paint what he was driven to paint. He must not perform the act of creation strictly for money or for our convenience. He must dance to the master’s tune.
And for all that, for all his laughing and carrying on while he did it, he never seemed to find pleasure.
I fell asleep leaning into my father’s side.
Sanba was standing under us.
“Hokusai, it would be good for you to disappear for a time. Utamaro has been arrested.”
My father’s arm tightened on me. He was silent for a minute. Then he called down, “So you tell me. And do you know what I answer? I feel for my friend. But how can I disappear? I am not a spirit, nor a demon! I am flesh and blood.”
Sanba gave a short, sharp laugh. “I think you will find a way, if you want to stay alive.”
We went to Shino’s house. It was early morning. The customers were gone and the girls asleep. Kana let us in, even though she was not supposed to. We slept there, in Shino’s room. Days were quiet in the green houses. Kana was kind, but she said we had to be out by the Hour of the Sheep.
Shino came to the door with us. I saw her put her foot into her sandal, and as she did so, I saw my father doing the same. For some reason the sight made me want to cry. Her small, delicate foot, a servant of other people’s desires. His callused, dry, and thick foot, ready for the roads. My stomach rose up and I was sick.
Shino cleaned me up. “I don’t want to leave,” I whispered to her.
Why was it, for me, so sweet within the thin walls of the bordello? The sadness spoke to me and piled up the woes of the courtesans with their foolish grace. It was like sour plums: I could lick and lick, tasting salt and sweet. They made your mouth raw, but you came to crave them.
It was late afternoon and the crowds were building. “Go to Waki’s tattoo shop. He will be frightened, but he will let you in. Stay there while the streets are full of people. Make sure Hokusai leaves Edo before dawn,” she told me.
“What about me?”
“Maybe you too. You and your father can both disappear for a while.”
My father was quiet, for once. He stumbled, holding me with one hand and Shino with the other.
We said good-bye.
We slept in the back of Waki’s shop and were up at dawn. The vomiting, the drunken songs, and the pleading of the small hours had barely died away. Only laborers rose at this time. The cleaners of the night soil had only just departed. The cats, my friends, were fighting over fishbones thrown out the kitchen doors of the brothels, but except for them, the street was empty. Waki had some money that the Mad Poets had collected.
“I’ll drop it by the jail for Utamaro,” said my father.
“You’re crazy. They’ll be looking for you.”
“No, they won’t. Not at the jail. It’s the one place they won’t dream of finding me.”
Waki and my father laughed then, arms on each other’s shoulders. Hokusai and I walked the length of the street. A tipsy samurai went into the house of straw hats and returned the one that had hidden his face. A child followed him. It was the job of this child to convince the samurai that the amount of change he was handed back from the merchant who had rented him the hat was too small for him to be concerned about. He should leave it to the hat renter, who would share it with the child, who would return a share to the courtesan, who would pay it out in tips to the
yarite
and the food provider. I knew all that—knew how money and much else flowed in this world—and it made me happy to understand.
At the gate, Shirobei retrieved the man’s swords. Then, hatless, momentarily recognizable to anyone, the samurai moved quickly to the top of the bridge and over the hump. The brown-skinned men with brooms followed, disappearing over the hump of the bridge. And we too followed in the wet streak their cleaning had left.
We humans are like snakes, boneless. We glide along on the earth, our scales rustling in the grass. We shrug off that skin, coming out green and new. Again and again we do this. Because of these sheddings, there is no sequence. You are a child and then a dried, wrinkled old woman, then a child again, then worn to ancientness, and then once again renewed. Your life can move two ways at once, as you grow old and grow young, folding back on itself and running alongside in the opposite direction. The snake may look as if it is not moving, but it is. All parts of it are equal. All parts of it are present. Life seems flat, ordinary. But a few moments of your childhood, or a few days, will be imprinted and stay with you in every detail, every year, reappearing in that new skin or lasting in that old skin, forever.
Sometimes the world or time itself goes quiet in honor of some change of state. This was the case now; it was the beginning of the end of my childhood. Dawn waited as we walked. I looked back. My father did not.
F
OR TWO HOURS
after we said good-bye to Shino, my father and I walked in silence toward the eastern edge of Edo. Then we came to the jailhouse at Nihonbashi, surrounded by its moat and thick wall. The wall was topped with metal spikes that pointed inward. It was as if some entertainment was to take place there; families and friends of prisoners were lined up by the gate, and vendors sold rice balls and tea.
“Such a popular place. Look at everyone trying to get in,” said Hokusai.
Over the walls we heard bravado shouts, like the ones you heard outside the Kabuki theater from actor-warriors. This was correct behavior. No one cried in pain, although there were muffled thumps. No one screamed in fear when led away. Everyone knew that.
We stood in the line and asked to see Utamaro. I was feeling fear, that forbidden thing. My father was not so brave either, but he was angry, which gave him strength. He was right, and Shino, Sanba, and the others were wrong: no one was looking for Hokusai here; the
bakufu
weren’t interested in him. Not yet. They had the famous one. We were able to talk to him, on the other side of the high window in the holding cell. We brought the money that the others had collected.
“Are you there?” said my father. “How are you?”
“How do you think?” came the outraged voice. “The cell is cold and airless, and it stinks. This place is full of criminals.”
“Well, it’s a jail,” said Hokusai.
“I never imagined. They charge you money for everything, even for a little space to sit, even to move away from the piles of shit.”
“We gave money to the outcast in your name.”