The great actor took the square of cotton, opened it like a book, and laid it on his two palms, flat. He looked at us.
“I see sparks flying.”
“You see no such thing,” says Sanba. “This is Hokusai’s daughter. I am saving her from toil.”
Danjuro raised his painted eyebrows. The effect was large in the narrow doorway.
“I hear the great artist uses his daughters as models for the
shunga
—”
“That is mere gossip,” said Sanba shortly.
“Gossip!” said Danjuro. “Shikitei Sanba complains of gossip?” He laughed, and his laughter floated over us like a ticklish, escaped feather.
I reddened.
“Better to stop talking and give us your face print.”
“Of course. I am your slave, critic,” said the great actor. “What will you write about my performance today? Never mind. Don’t tell me.” He turned his eyes to me. “And what do you think of the play? Will it succeed?”
I had nothing to say.
“It’s not a great play,” said Sanba, “but that may be in its favor. There is an appetite for these ghosts. It is the times.”
“They take everything your man here says with deep seriousness. I see the audience reading his reviews even in my finest moment,” said Danjuro. He began to laugh, Sanba with him.
People called for Danjuro to appear. But he was in no rush. He held the square of cotton. Then rapidly and fiercely, the actor pressed his face into the cloth as it lay stretched out in the palms of his hands. He pressed the cloth into his face, and his face into the cloth, and held it very still. Then, in a moment, he lifted it. He passed the cotton to me. His features were on it. Eyebrows, nose, lips, cheek gashes. It was a print, a seal of his face.
Sanba and I went to a restaurant on a boat tied up along the river. It was dark and dank and narrow. I suppose it was a place where no one would see us. And that seemed important, all of a sudden. Angled walls—we were down in the belly of the boat—and dark wood made it cozy. Sanba lit me a pipe with a match string he held over the tip, and passed it back. I inhaled deeply and felt the smoke burn my throat and my eyes. I drank some sake. The owner approached; he joked about picking up women. He must have meant me. Sanba was apparently the expert. He had come here before with a girl. This delighted me: I was glad to be in experienced hands. The owner fed him more than sake and soya beans—he fed him questions that Sanba could expand on for the entertainment of those few men slurping their noodles at the bar.
“Hey, Sanba, if I want to seduce a Buddhist nun, how should I go about it?”
“Confidently,” he said. “They are among the very easiest.” He coughed and downed more sake. “Women become nuns on impulse and later are hungry for male company.”
“But it’s against their religion.”
“Not at all,” he said. “If the Buddha cautions against sex, it is because most people develop attachments. To fornicate is sweet and good. Just remain detached and there is no harm.”
I swayed on my heels where they dug into my buttocks and sucked softly on the pipe. I loved the rough, scalding smoke in my throat. It was like doing myself a violence, but one of strange comfort.
When we had eaten, Sanba said he would show me where he worked. We walked to a small upper-floor room; a futon was on the floor. But something that had been said earlier had not left his mind.
“It is true what Danjuro said, then? Hokusai uses his daughters as models for the
shunga
?”
It was true; we modeled, in a way. But it did not merit such shocked gossip.
“Then you are not entirely innocent?”
“Not entirely.” I smiled.
I was untouched but not unseen. If I had lost something, it was a gradual loss and not one that was thrust on me. It was true—I had been research for the
shunga.
It wasn’t only me but also my sisters, when they were younger. We slept in one room. My father had seen our kimono open to reveal thighs, sometimes buttocks. My breasts, which hardly existed, and the buds and folds between my legs—all these had been examined.
I did remember my mother hectoring from the step-down kitchen: “Why bother the girls? Go to the brothels for that. Better still, you have a wife.” But she was always instructing my father, always finding fault, telling him in a shrill voice that he had done something wrong. This wasn’t any different. The voice simply announced that this examination of Ei or Miyo or Tatsu was an irritation to her, and while it might be a matter of convenience to my father, it wasn’t—what?—good manners, or in keeping with her ideas of current style, or a thing you did with your family.
But scandal? No.
I was willing to help. Lying on my back, my legs waving as if I were an overturned beetle, I laughed, and so did my sisters. It was all for the pictures: my father had drawn my parts with great precision, afterward comparing them to pictures he had seen in the Dutch anatomy books then circulating in Edo. My mother, far from being old-fashioned, as he accused her of being, had an idea of privacy that would exist only in the future. We lived in small rooms; we were all there together, day and night. We heard one another and smelled one another and saw one another. I took my sisters’ clothes. They stole my drawings. We all searched for the coins my father earned and lost.
I untied my obi in front of Sanba. I had no sense of privacy.
And yet.
It left me open. To him and to others. I had given something away before I knew I had it. I had to take it back so I could give it properly.
Sanba said to himself, “I seem to have made the decision to deflower Hokusai’s daughter.”
“Don’t ‘daughter’ me here,” I said. “I am Ei.”
“So you are,” Sanba said to me. “Relax.”
Difficult when under duress. “I’m trying,” I said.
“Don’t
try,
whatever you do,” he said. “That makes it worse.”
He touched me under my robes. His fingers were not soft but hard and probing. But they had expertise, I had no doubt. He knew just how to work through the furrows. My skin shrank. I hid my face. In hiding I came upon the smell of him, his chest, his kimono. I liked that part. I just didn’t like him touching my private places to try to make something happen. I didn’t want him to know how I worked.
But he continued on. I did not live up to normal performance standards. There was my reluctance to be known. There were some shocking parts that hurt. But somehow we got through.
And then I fell asleep, deeply. Sanba woke me from it and walked me home. I carried my square of cloth with Danjuro’s face print on it. At home I slid open the screen and the cold air entered the room.
Hokusai was still working. He did not look up. “You are home smelling of tobacco,” he said declaratively. “And relatively safe, I suppose.”
“Relatively,” I said.
We both lay down until morning.
T
HERE WAS NEWS
in the Yoshiwara. So Mitsu told me when we dropped in to her shop. It concerned the courtesan Shino. The blind man had written a letter to the owner of the canalside brothel saying he would buy out Shino’s contract. I acted as if I didn’t know. “But that’s not all! Oh
no,
that’s only the start of so many complications!” That owner had asked for a certain sum to pay her debts. Then Jimi, her original owner, stepped in.
Mitsu laid her hand along her jaw as if she had a toothache. She grasped her countertop with one hand; the magnitude of the announcement might blow her off her feet.
“What complications?”
“Kana and Jimi say they still own her.”
“Jimi doesn’t. He sold her,” I said idly. I peered inside the display case wanting to see the seahorses, whose grace and fragility I loved. I wondered if I looked different since I’d been with a man, and if Mitsu would notice.
“He claims that he didn’t, that he was just punishing her, that he was about to take her back. He claims that she has debts with him too. He says he was acting in anger and the sale is not legal. He says the Corner Tamaya still owns her.”
“Then why don’t they take her back?”
I watched my father’s face to see if he flushed or showed guilt. He did not.
“It seemed it would all fall through. And here with a man willing and ready! A shame,
izn it
? But, no surprise, money will solve it, the blind man will pay. He’s panting for her.”
It was rather graphic even for Mitsu, and I was rewarded with a slight flinch by Hokusai.
Mitsu moved out into the light of the street. I followed. “Jimi and Kana are insisting that they always loved her, that she was like a daughter to them. This is all for the benefit of the blind man, who can be milked for more and more money.”
She finally looked at me. She was alerted to a change. “Something’s different,” she muttered.
Hokusai’s lip curled. “How long will this take? She will not be beautiful forever.”
I laughed in his face. “The masseur is
blind,
Old Man. Does he know that she’s beautiful?”
“He knows,” said Mitsu. “His eyes have not seen her, but his hands have. His ears have heard her.”
Why did we say these words? They were hurtful to everyone. We were silent and moved apart. Mitsu developed a furrow between her eyes. Then she clapped her hands, like a babysitter calling the children.
“Never mind! Shino is making history. She’s the only woman in the Yoshiwara who has been sold three times and will be free by her twenty-seventh birthday.”
So Shino would marry. She could dress in plain indigo cotton, woven in stripes, like any townswoman. To our shame, neither my father nor I expressed gladness for her. We walked on with Mitsu still talking.
“Oh, and
thatz
another thing. The blind man has family! Like worms, they’ve crawled out of the woodwork. Just a poor dumb masseur stumbling around the pleasure quarters and he had nobody, but now he’s a moneylender”—she brushed her thumb and forefinger together—“we find out he’s got parents and a brother, all living in the suburbs.” This little cynical snip of life amused her and she started to laugh, and tears wobbled on her cheekbones.
“So where is Shino now?”
Mitsu lifted her shoulders slowly, grandly, and dropped them. She fixed her dark pupils on me. “I don’t know.”
I went to the canalside brothel at twilight. Shino was not sitting behind her lattice. I was thankful but apprehensive. I asked one of the other women kneeling in the lamplight where Shino had gone. “Corner Tamaya,” the white-faced shape said out of the side of her mouth.
At the Corner Tamaya, Kana opened her arms to me.
“A woman you’ve become,
izn it?
”
“It is.” I was happy and blushing. “How do you know?”
“I can see it. You have a secret smile.”
I smiled, not secretly.
“You’ve come to see Shino. I know. You are so happy for her. But she is not available.”
“Oh.”
“She’s getting ready. This is her number one day. Her last parade. Yes, her debt will be paid, you know. She will go out of the pleasure quarter a free woman. We wanted to do this much for her.”
“What is she doing?”
“The hairdresser has come. She is putting on her makeup. Putting on her lovely kimono for the last time.” Kana opened her hands once more to show there was no limit to what the brothel would do for her. “Then she will give it away. She will give away her bedding too, tonight.”
I couldn’t imagine anyone would want it.
The retirement parade was a ritual, although it was rare to see it. “Go on, now. Come back in a few hours and you’ll see her.”
I stood by the side of the boulevard. They came out of Corner Tamaya at twilight, the courtesans Fumi II and Yuko walking on either side of Shino. She did not stumble on this, her last public march, but smiled faintly, distantly, looking straight ahead, her chin up. The apprentices came behind carrying boxes of “gifts,” and the “boy” who carried the waste, that pathetic old man, paraded last.
There was a crowd.
“There she is, the
yakko.
Can you see the scar?”
“She walks beautifully,
izn it?
There won’t be one like her again.”
“She deserves her freedom. She was kind and good.”
Retirement was a kind of death to a courtesan. A good death: an end to that life of serving men. Her name would die too, I supposed. I wondered what name she would take tomorrow. She would be an ordinary woman, and she would leave the Corner Tamaya as a daughter leaves her parents’ house to go to her new husband—that is, after he handed over the money. Tomorrow there would be no more Shino. Who would she be? I wondered.
My friend looked neither right nor left. Her eyes saw no one: they weren’t supposed to. She looked straight ahead into the future and did the figure eight step with perfect balance. Each step ended with a little circle kick out the back, which signified her tossing off this world of debauchery.