The first to climb to the temple roof were the firemen. They shimmied up the pillars and clambered on hands and knees over the roof tiles. Hokusai swooped around with his broom.
From the rooftop the firemen shouted, “It is the Daruma. It is the Buddha!” And it was. The crowd roared. How had he kept its giant proportion in his mind? He was a genius, so they said. He took his bows. And collected the coins that were thrown.
Sanba was there, not impressed. “A simple matter. Anyone could do it.”
So much jealousy among these silly men! “Then why didn’t they?”
“They wouldn’t stoop to it.”
“You mean they didn’t think of it.”
“It’s not even so original; there have already been giant paintings by the monks Kokan and Hakuin,” he said. “He did it only to make money.”
“Is that something to be ashamed of?” I flared. “We need money. Don’t you?”
Sanba touched my arm. “You are his loyal daughter; of course you would say that.”
“I am. And if you are our friend, you are loyal too.”
I knew that any artist might have done it for money. But Hokusai didn’t. He didn’t care for money. He cared not much more for us. He did it to be known. He cared for fame. I would go along: I had to. But I understood finally what I’d glimpsed the night I tasted snow in his arms. This ambition, my father’s desire to be great and known as the greatest—not the
bakufu,
not cramps of hunger—was the true danger.
O
N AN AUTUMN
afternoon when I was sixteen, Shikitei Sanba looked over my shoulder as I drew the fine temple hairs of a courtesan and her maidservant, who were pictured side by side, in parade. He stood there for several long minutes. I tucked in my chin, fierce in concentration.
“Something I can do for you,
izn it?
” I said. We spoke the chic Yoshiwara dialect to amuse each other. Shino wasn’t around to stop me.
“You can let me stand here unmolested. I am interested in what you’re doing, that’s all.”
I thought of Sanba sometimes when I lay down at night and wanted pleasant ideas to ease my mind toward sleep. I would recall his presence, the way he included me as no one else did, even excluding others, as if he and I had an understanding. Prickles of warmth would come over my chest and climb up my neck.
Sanba and my father had a curious friendship based on rivalry. Sanba boasted that he was the only man in Edo who could live on his earnings from writing. Hokusai said that Sanba was obsessed with sales and cared nothing for quality. He said that Sanba was a hack, that his writing was trashy and borrowed from his betters. According to Hokusai, it was always the cheap imitations that sold and never the genuine. Anyway, if Sanba was so successful, why did he run his cosmetics store, offering secrets of eternal youth?
“Maybe because he really knows the secrets,” I said.
It was true that Sanba sold cosmetics—black powder, red paste, whitening creams—just outside the Yoshiwara. And on top of his popular immortality elixir, Sanba had created his own makeup base called Water of Edo. My father scoffed and called it eyewash.
“He gets it out of the river. No limit to people’s gullibility!”
But other artists had stores too, like Kyoden with his tobacco. Hokusai himself once sold condiments on the street. I began to suspect I knew why he mocked Sanba in particular. Despite the hack vendetta stories he produced on a regular basis, Sanba was a true original.
A cynic who believed in nothing, it seemed, but his own promises of eternal youth, Sanba had tight lips and frowsy hair. His dry jibes made everyone at the North Star Studio laugh, even my mother. He had credentials too, for having been persecuted. Before I was born, he had tangled with the fire brigades. Our flame-scarred citizens worshipped firemen, who were brawny but none too smart. When Sanba satirized them, they attacked his home.
This brawl had given him his start and made him famous. The authorities punished Sanba instead of the troops. He was manacled for fifty days. He showed me his wrists. They bore the badges of honor of the sitting classes, scars where the leather thongs had torn the skin. They were the same as those on Utamaro’s wrists.
“I celebrate them,” he said. Waki had made tattoos of cat claws around the risen, white tissue that circled his wrists and wound up his forearms. Surprisingly muscular forearms.
I wouldn’t see him for months at a time. Then in a minute, like today, just as I was finishing the hairline of a beauty, he would appear.
I moved my brush minutely, as I had been trained to do. Sanba leaned against my back. I could feel his bony shins on either side of my spine. “Let me take you to the Kabuki.”
“I’m working.”
He spoke to Hokusai. “Give the girl a break. You work her too hard. Anyone would think you can’t get on without her.” He coughed his small, practiced cough.
He knew how to twitch Hokusai’s pride. I blushed and bent farther over my painting. He said in a loud whisper that went in my ear and also over my head to Hokusai, “She’s got to see some of life,
izn it?
”
It was eleven o’clock in the morning, the Hour of the Snake. The clouds spun across the sky, lit from above as a sharp wind came in off the sea. Smoky yellow and gray moved off, leaving a clear, cold blue. Sanba strode ahead making instructive comments, as this was for my edification. His voice was bigger than his frame.
“ ‘Edo is the land of splendor, and without it there would be no place to sell things’—have you heard that famous line?”
I had.
“It’s mine,” he said. “I said it first.” He tried again: “There are three places where one thousand gold
ryo
change hands during the space of a day. Can you guess what they are?”
“The fishmarket is one,” I said.
“Yes.”
“The Yoshiwara must be another.”
“You are too smart.”
I pretended I didn’t know the third.
“And the Kabuki district.”
“Ah.” I scuttled behind him.
“Come up, don’t lag!” he commanded. “You are my companion, not my servant.”
The Yoshiwara had burned to the ground. Again. We picked our way over the wasteland of broken timbers and ash and discussed the rumor that the inhabitants had burned it down themselves. Certain courtesans had been charged with arson. Sanba was on their side.
“Good riddance to the place,” said Sanba. “It’s not what it was. No fun at all unless you like brigands wearing black hoods.”
He showed me a cellar where, he said, prostitutes were tortured. The house above it had collapsed. “It won’t be the end of the cruelty,” he predicted. “The owners have been given permission to relocate for a year, and they’re ecstatic. Things will be even worse: there won’t be any rules in the temporary quarters.”
We passed the area designated New Yoshiwara. Brothel houses were going up faster than shingles could be found: like our tenement, they were sided with the sake-barrel wrappings, a paper in abundance at all times. A troop of blind people with shaved heads moved together across the rough ground, singing out directions to one another.
We got a ferryboat along the Sumida, and Sanba stretched his arm along the gunwale. “I’m taking you from one evil place to another,” he said.
The Nakamura: I had walked by it many times, but I had never been in. It was not only for lack of money but also for lack of time.
“It’s where I am most days. When the orchestra plays the first strains of music, I’m in my little seat close to the stage. Although sometimes more goes on in the audience than does on the stage. I get splashed by water and mud. I never go out to get food. I just wash down a few bean-jam buns with tea. I never get tired of it.”
“Why?”
“It’s an immersion into the whole business of being human, that which Buddhists tell us is of no importance.”
“I take it you are not religious.”
He laughed.
It was opening day and tickets were free. Men were beating drums from the turret of the three-story wooden theater. The outside was hung with prints and advertisements and paper lanterns. We pushed through the sellers of sticky rice balls, hot teas, eels, and souvenirs. A lady of the court hid her face under the deep slant of an umbrella, finely ribbed and dyed a beautiful eggplant color. Members of Danjuro VII’s fan club were lined up, with his crest on their kimonos, on their headscarves, even on their umbrellas. They were already shouting out praises.
“Nothing to do with the show. They’ve got their opinions memorized,” said Sanba.
Facing the crowd, on the veranda of the theater, were dancers with scarves tied under their chins. They fluttered fans from cocked wrists. Women were not allowed to perform. These were men imitating women.
“Even so, the law demands that they be unattractive,” murmured Sanba, “to protect our morals.”
We were in no danger.
A man with a yoke over his shoulders sold watermelon. Sanba bought me some. I loved its color, red verging to crimson to pink, the crunchy flesh, the sweet juice, the black shiny seeds and the way you could spit them.
As we waited, the
kago
bearers pushed through. Sanba carefully took the watermelon rind from my sticky fingers.
“Here come the investors,” Sanba said. “If the play is popular, they’ll be rich men. Or they’ll be paupers. It depends on what I say.”
He gave his little self-mocking grin.
Out of their sedan chairs stepped the sleek, well-dressed men. They checked in all directions to see that their heavy coats were being admired, then shrugged the silk up their shoulders, shook out the folds, and faced the theater. They nearly pawed the ground with their feet, so eager were they to get inside. I saw the investors’ pasty, broad-cheeked faces and knew they were very nervous. I thought one or two of them gave Sanba a glance.
“You see how a cosmetics seller from the wrong part of town can get a little power?” he said. “They recognize me. They want a good review. But oh no, no, no. My good opinion can’t be bought,” he said.
The front row of people pressed closer and closer to the veranda, where the shapely male dancers minced and flipped their fans. Guards came to push them back. Sanba pulled me out of the way. A manager crooked his finger at us from the side door, and we were in.
In our box seats Sanba’s knees were crammed against the barrier. Mine didn’t reach. Above us were wooden timbers and more boxes where women sat fanning themselves from excitement. Below was the pit where laborers camped out with food for the day. I looked down on a mass of turning, tilting heads, ear to ear and nose to nape—I couldn’t see between them. A long wooden ramp stretched overhead from the back of the theater to the stage. This was the
hanamichi
where the great Danjuro would appear when his moment came. His fan club was going wild behind us. Actors, like us, were not officially counted as persons, but if Ichikawa Danjuro VII was not a person, I thought, he must be a very rich horse or cow.
Sanba bought me a booklet to explain the play. The paper was soft and the pages clung to each other. I held it to my chest and hoped he would let me keep it.
“I was going to take you to see a play of domestic realism.” Sanba laughed. “But I thought perhaps you had had enough of that.”
“Rude.”
“Instead, we will see a play about severed affection. The plot goes this way: A woman declares she is out of love with her lover and urges him to discard her, but she does not mean it. She is doing this for his own good. The lover does not understand her sacrifice and murders her. Her ghost comes to haunt him with the intention of protecting him, but instead it drives him mad.”
“I know a lot of ghost stories,” I said, “but that sounds more improbable than most.”
“Do you think so? On the contrary. Those reverses are all too familiar to me. You see, Ei, your father has not prepared you for life. You only know reprobates. You are sheltered from the disastrous hypocrisy and conventions of proper people.”
The story made no sense, but I loved the roaring, the postures, the applause, and the abuse. I watched the way the actors’ faces worked while painted white, with red lines across the cheeks. I forgot the dragging hours and lived inside the wrenching, overdone lives. When it was finally over and we got out into the tainted sunset, I felt as if I had two sets of eyes, my usual and a new set. I towered over my own body and looked down from above. Sanba and I had screamed and suffered as one. Now in the cold, damp air I moved closer to his body. And he pressed against me, once, and then moved away.
Would I like to meet the great Danjuro VII? Who wouldn’t? I climbed the stairs to the actor’s dressing room on the third floor, feeling proud: everyone treated Sanba with respect. “Welcome, teacher. Come and see, give us your thoughts. What did you think?” they asked.
At the top, Sanba called out. The door opened and there was Danjuro the man, diminished to a fraction of his size. The costume was gone, he was perspiring, and the makeup was tacky on his face. Sanba produced a cloth from the folds of his kimono. “Would you mark this cloth for her?”