Once across the wooden bridge the carters fanned out along the boulevard. They got out their shovels and started digging. I wondered where the trees came from. What nursery, what little paradise fed them until it was time? When the trees were in the ground, they would look as if they’d been there forever. In one week the little drop balls would be swelling and opening, and in two the seashell pink would be awash over our heads and all the parties would begin.
Mitsu, the gossip, came out of her shop. She pointed at my haircut and covered her mouth, giggling. My father got right down to business.
“Where is Utamaro?”
Her eyes expanded with relish.
“At home now. But things are worse, worse even than when you left!” she said.
I could see my father rock back and set his eyebrows up. Oh, yeah? She was too dramatic, Mitsu. The wrong person to talk to now. She loved bad news. You had to take everything she said and hold it under cold water for a minute.
“Scandal, scandal.” She stopped to catch her breath.
“Brigands! They broke into”—she named one of the midrange brothels—“and ransacked the place. They raped two of the courtesans and cut one of them in the neck. It’s terrible.” She lifted her great big knobby finger and waggled it. “Oh, this district is going to the dogs. In older days, you know as well as I do, these types would be stopped at the gates. Now we can’t even catch them when they don’t pay their bills.”
Next door, sweet-faced Waki was working on a back tattoo for a fireman. He left his client lying on the table and came out to greet us. “I will do an excellent job,” he whispered to my father, “because once you get one fireman coming to your shop, you get all of them.”
I realized then that it wasn’t the design that made him happy; it was the strong, masculine fireman lying there. He lifted his head and winked at us. He winked to show that he could take the pain. And Waki returned reverently to him. Here was the man-fabric he had been longing for.
Hokusai was agitated with the news but not unhappy. “That is the city,” he told me. “Always changing, always tragedies.” We had been gone for only a few days. Already Utamaro was out of jail and robbers were attacking the brothels. He smiled and tilted his head this way and that. The birds, the flowers, the cats in the gutter—they all got a smile.
We walked on to Etako’s inn. A man stepped in our path at the door.
“To what do we owe the pleasure?” said Sanba.
“I have returned to the world.”
“I suppose you missed me.” He included me in his smile.
“Not at all. It is only necessity,” said my father. “I must be in the world.”
“Well, the world has got a little darker since you left us,” said Sanba. He jerked his head toward the corner, where a man sat writing on a scroll, scowling. He made sure, swift brushstrokes, stopping every few seconds, dipping his pen and admiring his work. As he wrote, he reached out absently to grasp a little cup in his thick fingers, quaff the contents, and set the cup down.
“Who’s that?”
“Out-of-work samurai,” said Sanba. “He’s about to hector us. There are more like these every day.”
The man finished what he was writing. He stood and raised his voice over the noise of the crowd.
“Edo is becoming a place of moral disorder,” he shouted. Actually he was reading his own words. “Moral life has been thrown into disarray. It’s a disgrace!”
“First they come to enjoy our fun, and then they try to redeem themselves by pronouncing us evil,” said Sanba. “Sad-and-Noble’s work goes on.”
The samurai was using all those ancient words that were supposed to be our hallmarks. “Virtue and benevolence have been lost through treachery!”
“He’s a moron,” said my father loudly.
The courtesans nodded in the corners of the room, making assignations. “Whose treachery, love? Have you had your heart broken?”
“Love is all you think about. Look at you! Playing at love. Working for your own gain. What kind of men are you? Spending your money on prostitutes and drinking. No one is loyal. No one is serving his master. What has become of the Way of Tranquilizing the People?”
“Too true, I say. What
has
become of it?” said Sanba. “Maybe it is becoming the Way of Waking Up the People?”
“You glorify your bodies with silks and luxurious bedding. You worship beauty as if it was”—he sputtered—“as if it was a power in itself.”
It was. Even I knew that.
The samurai went on. It wasn’t only us he raved against. He reviled Edoites of every stripe. “Lords borrow money from the moneylenders. They even take the stipends of their samurai to pay their own debts.”
“You tell the lords the error of their ways. You won’t find them here,” murmured someone else.
“Only their spies.”
Howls of laughter. I began to smile. Like my father, I felt good to be there. For me it was safety to be in the melee.
“Where are the customary boundaries between the esteemed and the despised? Washed out! Down the gutters. These divisions are in
nature.
” The man slapped his thick palm on the tabletop. “What of the Way of Principle? Passion and madness have thrown things into disorder. All you do with your days is struggle between gain and loss . . .”
He was still shouting as Etako ushered him to the door. On the threshold he came face-to-face with a woman with a towering helmet of hair pierced by lacquer ornaments, wrapped in a cut-velvet cloak of purple and green leaves. Standing on clogs that boosted her ten inches off the ground, she loomed over him.
“And women’s hairstyles are far too elaborate!” he cried as a parting shot.
Hana-ogi VII gave a languid smile. She was the reigning beauty, the top courtesan, the most expensive, and the one whose hours any man in Edo would kill to buy. “I’ll read all about it when you publish your book,” she said, gesturing to his scroll.
“Pay for your tea, please,” said Etako.
“Do you see what I mean? Money, money, money?” the outraged guest asked the crowd, grabbing for his pouch. “The whole city is nothing more than a huge brothel. Everyone wants everyone else to pay, to pay, to pay. In the old days we had no need of money.” He threw coins in the dust. Then he went out into the street and disappeared into the throngs coming over the bridge and through the Great Gate.
We went to visit Utamaro in his rented room above the print shop. His skin was sallow. He was stooped. His wrists were lashed together with leather. A woman from next door had brought him sake; she bent to help him sip from the cup.
“Awkward, this,” he said. He had adopted a little toss of the head to speed the liquid on its way. He showed us where his wrists were rubbed raw. At night the woman pushed the thongs aside and rubbed oil in the skin. Sleep was impossible except for snatches of half an hour, and in those he only hovered below the surface of his waking mind.
“We feared for you in your examination on the White Sands because we know how proud you are. But you are well,” said my father.
Utamaro lifted his hands and dropped them. “I was let go,” he said, “if you can call this free.”
“Better than behind the walls of the jail.”
“You’re just glad that it isn’t you whose hands are trussed,” Utamaro said.
Hokusai was silent. How could he respond to this bitterness?
“You would not be able to paint. Even though you can paint left-handed and right-handed, you cannot paint no-handed. Even you, Hokusai.”
“My father can paint with his toes,” I offered.
Hokusai shushed me with a look.
“He can paint with his teeth.”
“I get cramps,” said Utamaro angrily. “I am older than you are. I am an old man.”
“We are both old men,” said Hokusai.
Utamaro lifted his wrists again and let them fall heavily on his knees. “They will remove these shackles physically, but they will always be on my wrists, heavy as the name they call me: criminal,” he said slowly, adopting it. “They have killed me.”
“No, Utamaro. Not you. You cannot be killed. You are immortal. And you were never afraid.”
“I am not afraid. It is not like in your ghost stories. It is not like that—dragons and snakes winding up at you out of the smoke of burning bodies. It is not like that. That is not fear.”
“What is fear, then?” said Hokusai.
“I can tell you how it starts. It is an evil worm growing within, and because it is growing, you must deny it and always be boasting.”
My father was listening carefully. His friend had been pulled down. The man was crumbling. I felt the desolation of it.
“And how does it end?”
“It doesn’t. It simply becomes a part of you. It saps your strength. Perhaps there is no end,” said Utamaro. “Perhaps the end is . . .” He raised his hands to show that he meant death. “There is no honorable way to live with it.”
Hokusai said nothing. Utamaro smiled. “They said you made great sums of money selling to the Dutch.”
I sucked air through my teeth.
“Only once, and it was soon gone. Four years ago. Not great sums.”
“Yes, they were.” Utamaro twitched his head again to get the hair out of his eyes. “I will be honest. This success of yours eats into my gut. It is wrong that the Dutch take your work. I am older and I am greater and I speak for the people more than you do.”
“Not true!” I piped, but my father said nothing.
“How is it, Hokusai, that you are free? It appears that when you break the rules, it is not a problem for the
bakufu.
Why is that? I wonder. Because you are a peasant and your art is the art of peasants? Because you are unimportant, I think. Or is it because of those noble ladies? Your courtesan has a powerful family. Is that how you get your ability to slip away unnoticed when trouble comes?”
“Perhaps,” said my father, “I am a ghost.”
“Yes, I think perhaps you are,” said Utamaro, jerking his head toward the woman for her to bring the cup to his lip. It was like a ballet, the way he guided her hand with his eyes, opened his mouth in a narrow, elegant slit, and then quickly flicked his eyelids. She tipped the cup suddenly and then brought it back again. A slug of sake went neatly into the slit, and he swallowed.
“How is it for you, child?” he said. “Will you slip away as your father does and manage a kind of freedom? Will your plainness, your strange lack of femininity, save you?”
He had never looked at me with any interest. I was not what he liked in a girl, or especially a woman. Had he been studying me? Why did he ask?
“What will you do?”
“She has some promise as an artist,” said Hokusai. “She will help me.”
Utamaro shrugged. He looked back at my father. “Those with children believe they will be immortal. But you are nothing special. You think you are, but you are not. You are like all of us, swept along with events. Without power and without recourse. Carried along.”
He raised his strapped wrists and rubbed them on his forehead, scraping the skin so it came away and blood ran down between his eyes.
A
S SOON AS
I could, I ran, dodging vendors’ carts and gawkers and dawdlers, to the Corner Tamaya and Shino.
As usual, Kana was guarding the entry. She was adding up all her expenses in the account book. It was hard to imagine her as a beautiful courtesan. She was unkempt now and thick in the waist, harried and coarse, but somewhere in her heart she had feelings. She smiled to see me. To her, I was just some local kid who liked to visit the kitchen. She did not suspect me of having thoughts. I hung by her desk. I saw a receipt that said a new girl was the property of Jimi. The price he had paid for her was written: two
ryo.
“Quite inexpensive, at that price,” I said.
Kana snatched away the receipt.
“She is not intelligent,” she complained. “And anyway, she is addicted to opium. I don’t know why we took her.”
“Maybe you wished to be kind,” I said. It was fun to prod her this way.
“That is just it! Kindness! You are a perceptive child, aren’t you? That is why we are not profitable, not anymore. People don’t understand how risky our business is. How we take these girls in—where else would they go? We train them. Look how beautiful they become, and how useful. Of course, anything could happen—they could get sick and die. So they do. And there is our investment, gone into the graveyard. We have very little profit. We work seven days a week, and the customers are so badly behaved!”
“It’s awful,” I said.
“And the policemen! Every time they’re short of money, they come by the door. They accuse us of some small infraction of the rules and stand by with their hands out. Really! Do you see this column? This alone is for bribes!”
“And now robberies,” I prompted.
“Just as you say! Fortunately, that was not our shop. Oh no, they’d never get in here, not with the boy on the lookout.” The “boy” was a wizened old man with a cane who took out the sewage.
Kana looked around and beckoned me closer. “But that, shocking as it was—robbery! rape!—is not the worst. The worst, the very worst, is that my husband keeps on having sex with the girls. It shocks you, I’m sorry. But you are growing up in the middle of this. You’ve seen it all. I told him no! I told him I would leave this place, I don’t care where I end up, if he keeps on with it.”