It sat at the far end of the rectangle of land that was the Yoshiwara. There, the drained marsh reasserted itself; the street was always muddy, and as summer advanced, there were mosquitoes. The proprietors didn’t bother with colored lanterns or flowering trees. Each dark door was the same.
Just before noon most days, I could catch her when she emerged. Down here, beside the well and next to a tiny burial ground, was an old Buddhist temple, its red paint worn to flecks. It was a quiet place: no one else went there. I followed her, but she asked me to wait a little distance away while she prayed. When Shino came away, she smiled.
“What is this praying? I never knew you prayed.”
“I have made mistakes,” she said. “I must pray to the gods for the strength to control myself.”
I waited, weaving in and out among the leaning gravestones of this famous courtesan or that. They had been buried here, once, with pomp, I supposed. But no one kept their graves. I spoke over the headstones, holding her from going back to her brothel. “One little mistake,” I said. “You didn’t hear him coming.”
“Oh, more than one. I have let the heat of my temper get the better of me.”
I did not see that as a mistake.
“Remember what I said,” she instructed. “When your anger goes out—”
“Your fist stays in.” I frankly did not see it.
“You must not feel pity for me.”
“I know. Do you have open-kitchen days? Are the other prostitutes funny?”
No, she said. And there would be no more classes in self-defense. “You can practice in your mind and no one has to know,” she said. She said she had quelled the demon of pride. She had learned to behave according to her station. “There is always someone watching.”
The blind man came often. He was possessive. I understood that he had a name, but I would not use it. She didn’t use Hokusai’s name either. “Your father,” she said to me sometimes, as if he were a man she did not know directly. She never asked me why he hadn’t stepped in. We knew the answer: to buy her, he would have needed money. And although he sometimes was well paid, sometimes there was no work. When we had money, it went quickly. Where to was a mystery, and he became fierce and scornful if I asked him.
Meanwhile, the tall, sad, wispy woman turned up in picture after picture, always alone. Anyone could see Shino was the one he painted walking under willows, holding umbrellas, waiting for lovers.
“You have one who watches you and one who sees you,” I said one day. “The blind man watches and Hokusai sees.” But the blind man’s watching was hopeless because he had no eyes. And even though my father saw her truly, saw who she was, he could do nothing.
“Maybe it’s the opposite,” she said. “The blind man sees me truly, without eyes, while your father only looks and sees the outside.”
“One puts you on paper and the other puts his hands on you.”
“Rude girl.”
I had nearly made her cry and I was glad. I was cruel. The blind man was her livelihood now, her only client. Shino had to treat him with deference. She made this her discipline, her spiritual training. If she made him happy, with any luck he would see her through her term in the Yoshiwara.
“He is taking the training to be a moneylender,” she offered. And then later: “He cannot come to me because he’s saving his money to buy the license.”
I believed she had given me that message so I could tell my father, and I did.
U
TAMARO JOINED THE
Mad Poets again. His handcuffs, the chosen punishment for the “seated classes,” as they called us, were off. But his hands hung heavy in front of him like useless things in which he had lost interest. His skin was yellow. His hair had fallen out. The bridge of his nose, the famous proud, high bridge of his nose, was bony.
The boulevard gossips said that Utamaro was too tired to go on. They said that he had given up and that all he wanted to do was speak about the old days.
Then suddenly, he was dead.
He died of the handcuffs, people said.
They talked of nothing else.
No one dies of handcuffs. He was an old man already.
He died of the humiliation of the handcuffs.
No, he did not. They could not humiliate Utamaro.
But he couldn’t paint with them on.
They’d been removed.
He died because he did not want to live.
T
HE CITY WAS
full of bodies. Not only thrashed corpses and pickled heads, but quick bodies, wily and always in motion. The tattooed firemen raised their ladders showing cleaved buttocks and stout necks. Courtesans sat in windows with their kimonos sitting wide over pale, round shoulders. The standing legs of throngs in the temple markets were like thickets of bamboo. If you paused going over a bridge, a dozen arms pushed you forward from behind.
Bodies were the spokes in the wheels that made the city roll. One day I’d watch a pack of girls learning a new dance. The next I’d catch acrobats in front of the theater somersaulting to bring in the crowds. Boys flew kites in the riverbed, and even the courtesans got out to play on festival days, batting at shuttlecocks. These bodies were my father’s subjects. His brush was alive with them. Skeletal old men, tubby children, winsome girls, monks at prayer—whatever moved attracted his eye, and the movement went straight from his eye to his brush to the paper.
Carpenters and bricklayers heaved up their loads in the streets, adding stories to our cramped buildings. The old ways cramped us too. We could not be contained. Even scarred Shino in her veranda with its wooden pickets would rise again. She would have a blind moneylender for her lover.
I saw how life was punishing and how bodies took the brunt of it. At the fish market I watched an exhausted old man drag his lame leg, dodging the brown, healthy young ones as they tossed a giant tuna back and forth. His wife tidied the shellfish on their cart: she was smaller than me, but her hands—scarred from the shell edges, gnarled and swollen-knuckled—were brilliant, arranging frilled shells in exact lines. Those wrinkled fingers flashed; they darted like swallows, showing their ugliness only when still.
Women’s bodies swelled like fresh fruit and withered just as fast. In the public bath I watched covertly as the married ones took off their clothes. After the evenness of youth, female bodies gave away to folds of flesh, rolls in the thighs, scrawny ribs. Yet each woman was proprietary, scrubbing off her dead skin, patting her pink, moist folds.
If he had nothing else, a man had his own body. A woman too had her body. At least until she took an adult shape. Then, most likely, a man wanted it. If he took it, he gave it back worn and used. I watched these things and, perhaps without knowing, decided that I would be the kind of woman men did not want.
My own body was dressed again in girls’ clothes. I was fourteen and ugly. So everyone said. My jawbone was wide, breaking my face out in a diamond shape. My chin protruded with a round knob. They called me Lantern-Face. I worked in the North Star Studio. I was the errand girl for Hokusai.
The day I remember, I had gone with him to the bookseller’s stall. I rested at the side of the street. I did this as often as I could. If there was dust, I drew in it with my toe. If there was mud, I used a stick to make my lines. If there was paper and a brush and ink, I made sketches from life, just as he did. This day I wandered off and hung around the fruit seller with her trays of watermelon until she gave me a piece. I slurped it down, and the thin, red juice drooled down my cheeks; I spit the black seeds up into the air. Shino would have been scandalized by my manners.
I stood for a while in the crowd gathering in front of a man who sold perfumes. “Almond blossom,” he shouted. “Almond blossom.” The sweet, delicate smell was lost in the charcoal fumes from the
yakitori
stand and the sweat that rose up among the bodies. Then I went back to listen.
My father was showing Tsutaya his new work. He’d made a design of a boat harlot, slumped in a corner and wrapped in a black headscarf. It was meant for an album of Edo courtesans. These were the lowest of the low; they worked in the cold, damp anonymity of the canals. The blacks and reds were deep, saturated on the paper.
“I don’t think so,” pouted the publisher. “It’s so dark. Anyway, we don’t need more courtesans. It’s more difficult every day to get these things by the censors.”
That annoyed me. The truth was I’d painted in the colors myself, after Hokusai made the outline.
He brought out another:
Tipsy Beauty.
The courtesan was drunk and leaning over a black lacquer box. I’d had a hand in that one too.
Tsutaya laid a heavy hand on my father’s shoulder. “You’re bound and determined to show the dark side. Fine, if it suits you. But I can’t sell ’em. Not like this. Not unless I find a real connoisseur.”
I went to the back and watched the wood carvers; if the publisher bought our designs, these men stuck the paper to the cherrywood to transfer the image, and then cut the lines into the block. Their carving tools were crescent-shaped or knife-straight, in sizes from baby finger to fist. The carvers were tucked cross-legged into low desks, digging out tiny bits of wood and blowing them off the edges of their knives, cutting the fine lines of our writing as well as every sensual curve of the figures. I marveled at their dexterity. They nodded silently to me, never losing concentration.
When I came back, I could see that my father hadn’t made the sale.
“Why doesn’t he publish you anymore?” I said.
“He’s afraid I’m bad luck,” said Hokusai.
It was his good luck that had made Hokusai bad luck. His good luck was that with Utamaro gone, he was now the most famous artist in Edo. How you could be both famous and poor was a puzzle to me, but that’s how it was. His bad luck was that he was popular with foreigners, and the publishers suspected the authorities would turn on him. The Dutch were back in Edo, kept secluded in their strange house with its windows above eye level. Patient crowds stood along the bridge opposite. Every day, reports went out about who went in and out the tall door. Scientists and students of
rangaku.
Famous actors and courtesans, even Hana-ogi. It was she who sent word through one of the apprentices that Hokusai’s old clients were again looking for his work. The
opperhoofd
wanted to see him.
“Tell him if he wants to see me, he has to come to the North Star Studio,” said my father.
I don’t know why he insisted on entertaining important people at home.
Our studio was like the scene of a crime.
It was only one room, identical in size to the adjacent room, where we lived. At least we no longer slept on the same mat. We all had separate mats, but they lay side by side, touching, around the hearth. In the morning we ate our food on the same spot. There were two of us females, my sister Tatsu and I, and the boy Sakujiro left at home: my older half brother had been apprenticed to Nakajima the mirror polisher. It was the same family my father had been apprenticed to once, but he had not taken on the work or the inheritance (another stick my mother used to beat him). Still, the Nakajima family remained curiously interested in us. Although my father—thinking himself too good to stand in the long hallways of the castle and rub the bronze so it was perfectly clean at all times—had flown in the face of their generosity when he was a boy, my half brother had been conscripted to do the job. His labors brought in a little money—more than any of ours would have—so no one complained. My sister O-Miyo had married one of my father’s students. Tatsu and I worked in the studio. My mother took Sakujiro to school. The boy was her greatest pride, and he knew it.
The “studio” wasn’t big to begin with, just six tatami mats in size. The sides were packed with chests holding prints and studies. There were always students working with us, sitting on the floor or at low desks, drawing from life. There were chickens, monkeys, and rabbits in cages for us to draw. Someone usually had a bird in a cage or a fish in a bucket, and the cats—my pets—were always prowling and ready to pounce.
It was noisy too. O-Miyo returned to us by day, bringing her crawling son to the studio. He poked the cats with sticks and spilled the paint on purpose and laughed. I did not like that boy.
The work took over everything and it brought us nothing: that is what my mother said. My parents still fought. My mother would not give up. She could not believe she wasn’t going to get what she wanted. They fought because my father was bad about keeping track of money. And he spent it on his own entertainments, whatever they were—painting parties, a little gambling. Nothing out of the ordinary, but she felt he was cheating her. And so the noise of their shouting added to the screech of the caged birds and the sound of O-Miyo scolding her son and my father’s mad, crazy laughter.
He kept us entertained. He painted with his left hand and with his right. He could paint above his head or, by reaching between his knees, on the floor behind him. He made paintings with his fingernails, laughing while he did it. Just now he was writing a book called
Strange Food.
He played around with rice, soups, sake, tea, cakes, vegetables fresh and dry, crustacean eggs, and he sang this little song about sake: