Two policemen were at the head of the procession. Behind them, oxen strained, heads down, and horses cantered. The drivers shouted. The porters trailed along like bent hooks under tubs of foodstuffs and a cookstove. Then came a giant black piece of furniture, borne aloft on men’s shoulders. It was covered with a red cloth written on in gold: this was their counting house.
The bearers stopped. The palanquins jolted to a stop with the curtains open. The barbarians’ heads poked out; two of them climbed down to see what blocked the road. They were very tall and dressed in heavy black coats with hats like stovepipes. Their skin was pasty white, and copper hair hung from their chins and grew under their noses. Their eyes were cool and lit from within, like the eyes of wolves.
They opened their baskets of linen and their cooking pots, and they set up their bizarre furniture, tables and chairs. The bearers began to prepare tea. A lacquered black sedan chair shook, and out of it came their leader, like a tall puppet. He sat for his red devil meal of tea and cakes while the doctor began to look at the sick babies and old women.
My father approached. The translator glanced down at him: a peasant, dusty, on the road with other peasants.
“I have a question. Your scientists say that the world is round. Is it true?”
“Yes, it is true. We have sailed all around it in our ships.”
My father had many more questions, and finally three barbarians spoke to him and showed him the instruments they aimed at the sky. The moon was round; he could see that. Maybe everything was round. But if it was, then what about straight lines? Where did they come from? And how about the directions to the stars? Did those directions change when you were in a different place in the world? Was the sky possibly round as well? It would change everything.
The answers did not convince him, but Hokusai thanked the Dutch and told me we had to hurry on. It was getting dark.
He explained it all to me when we found a teahouse that would take us in.
“If this is true,” he said, “there can be no straight lines.”
I didn’t believe it. Straight lines were everywhere. You just had to look.
“We will find out for ourselves. We are going to the horizon. We’ll see if it is curved.”
U
RAGA WAS A
small fishing village under a cliff, with sand shores. We had come out of the long bay that led to Edo. Now we looked out to the open sea. We walked to the far end of the shore, where there were some fishing huts. No one lived in these huts anymore; only a few old men and women walked the beaches with their eel spikes.
“I am Tokitaro of the family Nakajima,” said my father to one of them. They welcomed us. We put our bundles in one of their huts. My father sat on the beach and stared out at the sea, which he had told me was a great beast.
“What are you looking for?” I asked. There were no boats coming in, and none going out. Only the waves and the far horizon.
“Do you see that line? Where the water ends and the sky begins?”
“Yes.”
“That is the edge of the world. If the world is round,” he said, “that line must be curved, not flat. Tell me what you see.”
I looked at it very carefully. “It is a straight line.”
“You are wrong,” he said. “It is round, but it is very, very large—so large that it looks straight to us,” said Hokusai. “But it is a curve that is very wide. We are not far enough away from it to see the curve, not here.”
“We can’t get any farther away,” I said.
“Then we will have to change the way we see.”
Hokusai wanted to paint the waves. He sat for a long time trying to catch them at the right moment. But they moved too fast and were always dissolving in front of us.
“Nobody paints these things,” I said. “Paintings have people in them.”
“Yes, they have, but they don’t always need to.”
“Oh,” I said. I could see that he was planning more changes.
He was. He would make the people along the shore tiny, and that would show that the waves were big. He had the people all ready. Along the way to Uraga he had sketched peddlers of pots, toys, and baskets with their wares. Now he copied them onto a drawing of the shore. He made tiny offshore waves that arched like cats. He added himself, the old man.
I was certain that it was not the kind of painting people wanted. I said, “Who wants to see just the water and an old woman carrying sticks in a pack on her back?”
There had been light in the sky, but night was falling. My father walked at the edge of the water. He turned and walked into the water, then he turned his back on it and toward me. He did this again and again, like a child, returning to safety and then going deeper and deeper each time.
I could see the lightness of his skin. I could see the white rim of water where it rose up. I could not see the water itself because it was dark. But I heard it growl, the great beast. I was afraid of it, and of what it could do to my father. I tried running in it, but it sucked at my legs as if it would drag me down, and I jumped away.
He went deeper and the water picked him up and moved him. In the dark, it became invisible, but it still moved him along. I thought it might carry him away, and I began to whimper. My father had drifted. The foam was white or gray and occasionally came up and covered him.
A fishing boat appeared, coming in for the night. It came upon us suddenly, out of the dark. I imagined that the distance between me and the edge of the world was a scroll unrolling.
The boat appeared and then disappeared, rhythmically, as if in a dance. The men inside it were riding the invisible. Wind, or the pushing of the water, brought them in toward me. I watched to see where they would land, at the bottom of the scroll.
Foam swallowed my father time and again as the beast tossed. I stood on the sand. I thought that if I stood there at least he would come back to me. I moved back and forth along the shore, trying to be at his landing place when he finished his dance in the claws of the beast.
My father ran back and forth, echoing the motion of the boat as it rocked up and down on the waves, out far and high up. He plowed with heavy feet, then was loosed and skipped, then turned as if he carried weights, then pushed sideways as if he had to push crowds out of the way to get where he was going. The water was black paper. He was the brush. His strokes were making a figure. What was he drawing?
I watched a long time. He drew many characters with his body. He stopped and started as if moving to music. He strove to remain erect. He strove to stay above the waves. His body used every muscle to articulate itself. It came to me that he was drawing his path. Perhaps it was his message to me.
But I couldn’t read it.
I called out to him, “Old Man, come back.” He did not answer. I even wheedled: “Old Man, I can make you some nice tea . . .” The water made him deaf. “Hey, you! Get the hell back here!” I tried. “You ugly thing!” Nothing.
I will remember this forever, I thought. I had no idea what forever would be. I did not know what my life would be, but standing there behind my father as he danced with the waves, I knew that I would always watch him tumble, would always think the ground underneath me tumbled just as the waves did. I would never trust that solid ground. I would face the tumult, scanning for the shadow man I loved. I was his child, but he was mine too.
We grew up early in my time. We learned about sex and the women who sold themselves in the Yoshiwara.
We were with the men in the studio when they painted the erotic prints. All those pictures of couples grappling, of women forced down to the mat—as if we didn’t hear it at night too, in our houses.
We knew about the hardness of life. I took charge of the money when my father couldn’t or wouldn’t. I heard my mother saying the words that would make him stop loving her. But that wasn’t the moment that turned me from a child to an adult. It was that day, in the waves. Me hollering after him like a mother.
When he came in at last, I asked him what he was doing. I gave him my boy’s jacket and tried to warm him. He was so excited he didn’t notice I was cold too.
“Puzzling,” he said. “I’m trying to understand. I know I’m here and there’s motion everywhere and there’s motion against the motion. I know that the foam and the water are two parts of the same thing.”
“Are they?”
“Yes,” he said. “Like ghosts and live people. Like spirits and demons. It’s fluid and it’s like smoke. It may even be like clouds.”
“That’s good,” I said, although I did not understand.
I went farther down the beach and asked a fisherman’s wife if she could give us some supper. My father would make her a sketch, I said. And he did, of her husband pulling in his nets. She was pleased. She lent us two mats and two cotton blankets for the night. Then we went back to our little hut.
In the morning, when the sun began to emerge out of the water, my father was up again. He crouched on his heels at the shore and watched the fishermen push long skiffs through the advancing waves to get away through the crashing surf. When a boat shot through the wall of water, he cheered.
Then he watched as wave after wave broke.
The wind was high. It plowed a furrow in the water. This was the beginning of a wave. The wave rose higher and then it was too high for itself. Before it broke, it began to pour. Clear water ran smooth as satin from the top froth to join in the indigo swirl below.
After a long time, Hokusai stood. He put his feet in the wet sand at the water’s edge. He walked in deeper; his feet sank a little into the sand.
He whooped with delight.
At noon it was warm. We splashed ourselves, and then we lay down at the edge of the sea. The fisherwomen had big hats and covered themselves. We were showing our skin.
“It is difficult to bear the cruelty of one’s own people,” he said.
“What are you talking about?”
I felt the mixture of heat from the sun and cold from the watery sand on my body.
“I will have another chance. I will do better next time,” he said. Then he ran out and tried to jump the next wave.
I felt life endless ahead of me. There would be next times and next times again and again, lifting us up and plowing us under.
We stayed there all that day and the next. He grew braver about the sea. “It is a beast, but I can tame it,” he said.
“I don’t think so.”
He went out farther and the froth curled around his skinny chest.
He couldn’t swim, so I had to follow him. I couldn’t swim either. As I reached the place where he was, he went to his knees to greet the water. I followed, trying to stay standing. The water sucked me back, trying to pull my flesh from my bones. He let it knock him. He went sideways and straightened himself. I spit salt out of my mouth.
“We will come to this life again,” he said.
The wave slapped him.
He went deeper, turning sideways. Now he was standing in a blue and white water spiral.
He fell.
The wave pounded him down to the sand. It scooted him forward. He was rolling. He had no control. He was in the wave.
Gone.
I stood. I waited. I watched for him to come up. I waded a little closer to where the water stopped its slide forward and began to slide back. I stood.
He popped out of the wave and slid forward on the sand.
My two ankles were there like bamboo stems. He grabbed hold of one.
I decided to try it. I lay in the shallows, letting the water push me. The wave from behind was cloudy, then clean as it curled down.
The motion of the water pushed me down.
I was very cold and frightened but happy: I was playing with my father. He was all mine. I wondered if he was thinking about Shino, or about my mother, or about what he did with one and the other. I wondered what he thought of me and then realized that I knew: he did not think of me. He was used to me, that was all.
So it fell to me to think of myself. What was I like? I was not in the habit of thinking of myself as separate from him, from anyone. I was ugly, I supposed, but I was smart and ready with my tongue. And with my brush I could do whatever he expected. That seemed to be enough.
Later in the afternoon he came and sat on the sand and waited for the wind and the sun to dry him.
“Now we will go back to Edo,” he said.
I was disappointed. “I thought we were going to live here.”
“One day we will. But for now I must go back.”
“Why?”
“I have to find a publisher and make prints and sell my work.”
“But you said we would live here. And you would trade your sketches for food.”
“Did I say that?” He looked genuinely puzzled. “It’s no good. I can’t. It won’t satisfy me. It’s not the real world.”
We stood up and began to walk back.
I
N THE YOSHIWARA
it was spring. Carters with bursting cheeks walked up Primping Hill with cherry trees in tippy wheelbarrows, clouds of lime green on thin gray stems. The wheels rumbled, hollow, up the mound of Hesitation Bridge. On the down slope the men ran around in front and pressed their backs against the barrows to stop them rolling out of control through the gate.