Then Ienari gave the sign. The predator shot forth like an arrow, pierced the heart of the crane, and brought it down. The dogs splashed toward the corpse. The falcon returned. Ienari stroked its neck lovingly.
Another crane flew up. Again the falcon went out to murder the bird of good luck, and again the dogs went mad for the blood.
There were larks, too, caught that day. There were others; I tired of it instantly. At last it was over. The shogun’s party repaired to a restaurant, where the cook prepared the crane in the ritual way. We made our way up to the Senso-ji Temple, where the art competition would take place.
Senso-ji was our home ground, which gave us an advantage in the competition.
Buncho went first. He made a brush sketch of the tidal garden we’d just left, the platform where Ienari had sat, the soft grasses of the marsh. His brush never varied in speed, never flipped or stabbed. He finished his sketch and remained still for a few seconds. Then he bowed extravagantly. The falcon deigned to turn its ears, keen enough to pick up the scratching of the brush while tucked inside its pretty helmet.
Minions lifted the paper and held it up so everyone could see. They sighed in appropriate awe.
Ienari paced back and forth. His step was heavy and rigid. His face showed a past of self-indulgence and certain gratification. The day would unroll as each one did: he would have his way, and there would be death and obedience and worship and pleasure. What did it matter? He had been too young; he had earned nothing. Even among shoguns there is earning and not earning; there is worthy and worthless.
“You now,” he said, barking in Hokusai’s direction.
Hokusai’s large ears were turned upward. He appeared not to hear the ruler. He gave a soft whistle. The falcon glared and did not turn a feather. My father was teasing the bird. He was trying to make it lose its concentration; by his very nonchalance, he was spreading insurrection.
Sadanobu cleared his throat regretfully. He seemed to say,
I could have had you all wiped out, back when I was senior councilor, and I didn’t. I am too soft-hearted.
Ienari laughed at the stubborn little man as he stood in his poor robe with a roll of paper. “Come now, will you make us wait?”
“Oh,” said Hokusai agreeably, “is it my turn?”
I hung my head, waiting for the axe to fall. Failure to fear, a crime for which Sadanobu had often had people convicted, was written as if on a placard over my father’s head. But it was not failure. It was refusal.
Ienari laughed.
Hokusai fumbled for his brushes. He took the roll of paper. He stepped forward, his forehead wrinkled with pleasure. The retainers’ faces were grim. Ienari appeared to be charmed. Hokusai hummed a tune. I was wobbling under the weight of the stupid chicken cage. Its inhabitant was obviously the only bird there that did not know how to behave. Flapping around in its cage! Feathers coming loose. Loud squawking. It had no idea what it was doing there, and neither did I.
Everyone was watching Hokusai. Oh, he was famous, that was true; even the shogun had seen his pictures. The very fact that we were here showed the change in Edo. The refined Noh theater and the Kano school of arts were losing fans among the aristocrats. The officially despised, tawdry, and cheeky Yoshiwara culture had never been more fashionable.
Hokusai rolled out the paper. I had put it together the day before. It was fifteen paces long. The ends would not lie flat. He gestured to the guards: You stand on that corner, hold it down. You on the other.
Ienari laughed again. Then he gestured to the guards that they should do as Hokusai wished. “Go,” he said to them, and four of them went.
I bet he hadn’t laughed like that since he was a nasty little boy putting worms in the maids’ noodles.
Sadanobu’s teeth clenched. But as the samurai clinked and rattled in their armor to their spots on the paper, certain nobles began to follow the shogun’s lead and titter.
Hokusai scooped up the air in front of his body with his hands, indicating more laughter, more laughter. And the laughter got bigger, and now the corner-holders themselves were smiling sheepishly and it was not laughter at anyone—it was just laughter.
I put down the chicken’s cage.
Hokusai took up his mop. I mixed the blue indigo ink with water in a pail. He bent down and soaked the straw ends of the mop. He walked over to the paper, eyed it from this way and that, smiling to himself, waving to me.
Buncho, beside Sadanobu, straightened up from his deep bow. I saw his elegant, understated work and I saw something else: he too was smiling.
Hokusai got down on all fours and pushed his face near the paper. He lifted his mop from the bucket. A drop of paint fell from it. Sloppy. He looked at his audience and smiled. Then he lowered his brush to meet the paper at the exact point where the drip had fallen, beginning his work there.
Everyone could feel the change: he was unaware, now, of the birds, the sky, the temple market, the waiting retinue. It did not matter that the shogun was there. There were no more airs or poses. He began.
He painted a long blue line, walking with his mop the length of the paper. He pressed the giant brush, and twisted it, and pressed on the other side, getting the most of the ink. He created a long, wavy blue line. Even the chicken was quiet. I had been speaking to it. I had reassured it. But it was false reassurance; I did not know what its fate would be. Was it to be some sort of sacrifice?
Hokusai jerked his head at me. “Oei!” he hailed.
“Old Man!” I shouted back.
My next job was to produce the red ink, and this I did, with more water and a bowl.
“Oei! Bring the chicken.”
I opened the cage door. The chicken went berserk, flapping and squawking, but didn’t get out. I fished around in the cage with my hand. The chicken fought for its life and I could not get hold of it. There was a moment of chaos. The falcon sat disdainful, its head turned away. The dogs were sorely tempted, but they held. I finally got the flapping thing by its two legs and pulled it out of its cage, not without a great deal of raucous poultry noises, some soft cursing, and a cloud of small white feathers.
Hokusai came to me, his robe tucked up into his belt so you could see his scrawny thighs. I transferred the frantic flapping thing into my father’s hands. The bird hung upside down. Mine won’t be an elegant death, it seemed to say, not like those that had been rehearsed here so often. But it was resigned to it and ceased to flap.
Hokusai reversed the chicken so it was the right way up. It took two of us to dip its feet in the red paint. We got them good and wet. Hokusai walked back to stand at the top of his samurai-pegged paper with the wide blue ribbon waving along it. Then with a great flourish, he threw the chicken into the air. It was too much for one of the dogs, which broke and had to be beaten.
The chicken could not fly. Its wings had been clipped. It settled on the paper and ran. It ran with its paint-soaked feet down the blue and then back up the blue. It saw my father’s feet and veered off, ran back and jumped into the sky, and flapping hard, elevated itself a few feet and escaped out of our vision. But it left its red tracks all over the painting, brighter at first and then fading out to faint stains.
Everyone looked at the paper.
Hokusai presented his work to the shogun.
“There,” Hokusai said, pointing at the paper. “The Tama River in autumn.”
The shogun was delighted, and everyone cheered and clapped.
We walked home alone. We were weary but happy that we had won the competition.
“Oei, Oei,” he said. “Hey, you. You did well.”
“Hey, hey, Old Man,” I said. “You too.”
I
T BECAME PREDICTABLE.
I went with Sanba to his writing room, wherever that might be. He had a little mattress there and he would lie down on it, shifting to find a less lumpy bit. When he was settled, he would pat the space beside him and I would lie down. I’d fit myself along his body; he would grunt and pull me closer, part my wrapped kimono, and seek the length of me with his bony legs.
I wormed closer. He put his mouth to my ear, the back of my neck, my shoulder. His lips were warm, but his body was chill. I was strong and limber but not much of a furnace. No words escaped me, just a yelp of happiness, now and again, when he stroked me.
What did he think about, making love to Ei? He knew me when I was six. He saw me grow up. In the studio he had seen drawings of my body parts. I brought no surprises. I believed that he chose me for my spirit, as my father had. There were thousands of lower-class prostitutes, nighthawks, and temple singers: women for view and for sale. But one has to pay even the lowliest of these. He did not have to pay me.
Whatever else, I had no shame. I was healthy and young and there was truth to me. And maybe it had brought me here, where I was happy.
“You surprise me, Ei.”
“I do? Why?” I said, digging for compliments.
“You are not humble.” His little cough, as always.
I fit myself neatly on top of his penis, which, I am happy to say, stood hard and at a good angle. I sat on his lower stomach, backing up a little on my hands and legs. His face was directly beneath my face, his breast directly beneath my chest and my tiny, upright nipples. My knees were on either side of his hips. I squeezed them and rolled him a little, side to side.
“By that you mean I ought to be,” I said.
I threw off the blankets. My eyes were used to the dark by then. I wanted to see the curved lines of his body against the blanket. I wanted to see everything.
When I rose from Sanba’s bed, weary and collecting my clothes to go home, I often thought of Shino. I had become a woman now. I wondered if she wished she could see me, if she still hoped that I had become elegant in speech and thought, like her. It was the only sadness in my life for those years. She was gone and there was no chance, in that teeming city where the townspeople had no second name, that I could find her.
I
WAS NEARLY TWENTY.
Sanba and I walked in the Yoshiwara late one afternoon. It was a festival day, and many people were gawking. But a wall of black clouds started to mass over the low, wooden buildings with their barred windows and unmarked doorways. Rain began. Umbrellas came out—orange, mustard, green, purple—their mounds and spokes sprouting and knocking one another, water splashing off at angles. Everyone had one but us. We skipped under the eave of the
ageya.
Thunder, a great bang of it, had all the visitors taking to their heels. The rain pelted. The thunder grumbled as if it might move away but then cracked again overhead. Then lightning—I liked to look at it, roaming the sky, snarling, letting out its white, flickering tongue. We stood, inches from the driving water, under the eave.
Between flashes I told Sanba how my father claimed that once, traveling the Tokaido, he had been struck by a bolt of lightning and thrown into a field. He lay there and could not move for a long time. After that he named himself Raijin, after the god of thunder, for a while.
We waited it out, craning our necks and saying “Oh, my” to each bolt. Finally, the rumbles and sparks ended. We stepped out. The crowds had vanished. The rain fell sullenly. We ran through the mud puddles to a tiny teahouse.
The teahouse walls, an earthen red, glowed in the lamplight. There were four seats. We squeezed in beside two young lovers. A child-sized woman stood behind a counter. It was low down, set on the earthen floor of an old kitchen that had once been outside the house. Her daughter asked us what we wanted. Sanba ordered
matcha
, powdered green tea. We reveled in our snug hideaway while outside the rumbling came back, stones rolling across a tin roof. The woman chattered: how loud it was, and how the people had fled. How all the courtesans must have stopped work—it was bad luck to have intercourse during strong winds and great rain. Thunder over lovers could shorten their lives. There was no escaping the god of thunder. The end was coming, so why run?
Izn it?
Sanba said that it was true. “The end is always coming, as long as you believe there is one.” This piece of irrefutable logic was lost on the teashop woman, who was truly frightened. He laughed.
I felt the clay teacup against my lips and the inside of my mouth, and the rich, thick pea-green tea. We were snug; we were protected. Wisdom dictated in such a storm to choose a low place and a low attitude where nothing stood up high to challenge the gods, not even your words. Yet here was Sanba showing his disrespect. “You tempt the gods,” I said to him.
“I’m not laughing about the storm,” he said. “I’m laughing at you.”
“Why?” I said.
“Because you are a kind of joke. The gods have made you a great painter, and they have made you a woman too. They have made you better than your father. It is a cruel joke.”
“What are you saying?” I said. The storm rummaged around in the invisible sky above us. “Not better than.”
“If not better, then you might as well not bother,” he said. “Stay at home and get married.” He knew this idea was repugnant to me. He gave his little cough and smiled cruelly.