More silence within and more rain without. Two slow, very slow, tears worked their way out of my bottom eyelids. I did not blink.
“Perhaps I am wrong,” he continued. “Maybe it’s not a joke but a tragedy. Whatever it is, I won’t be around to see it.” The rainwater ran over the clay tiles and dripped down the wooden pipes beside the house. I could hear it everywhere.
“Are you leaving?”
He did not answer.
The lovers got up and went out.
The tiny woman with the round face and the tense smile wiped and wiped her counter again. She dried and polished her dishes. Her daughter worked beside her, and finally they stood still, side by side. It was quiet in the sky. The storm was spent.
We walked into the street. The air was a shade of violet. There was no one out. It was a private time. At the long end of the row I saw a woman step tentatively from her house, her umbrella tipped down over her chalky face. She was far down the row of green houses. I stared into that distance. I wiped my face and found it wet. A feeling had just come over me: that my life was like that scene, a fearful, half-hidden thing just visible down a narrow, dark street.
Then the owners came out one by one and lit the big lanterns, and the orbs of light marched one by one down the row; Sanba went one way and I the other. I asked myself again,
Why am I different from other women? Why was I doomed? Was my father the danger?
My father was my teacher; I honored him. Only when I was angry did those feelings come to me, and then I pushed them away. I was duty-bound to him. I didn’t like Sanba saying my father was bad for me. Perhaps he was jealous of my father’s hold on me. Must my feelings for Sanba conflict with my feelings for Hokusai?
And was I truly a joke of the gods?
H
OKUSAI HAD LITTLE
time for the students who came to us. He collected some of them on travels. They lived in Nagoya or Osaka, and they took their classes in the form of letters mailed back and forth. Others became part of our life and our family. He gave their work a cursory glance and passed it to me or Tatsu. Shigenobu, the husband of O-Miyo, wanted to do things his way and had no patience with my father’s commands. He and my father quarreled and parted, but O-Miyo and her brat still came to us.
A man named Eisen came to the studio then. He was of samurai background. He excelled at beauties and wasn’t bad at landscapes either. My father did not teach him but gave him tasks, pictures of his own to copy. He did this to all the men, but with Eisen it was somehow worse. He criticized the affable giant loudly about little things: the speed with which he applied his paint; the mannerisms that—to be truthful—all the disciples had. They had to develop personal tics as they tried to follow but still distinguish themselves from the master. Hokusai would not allow Eisen to progress. Eisen was decadent, my father said. He drank and kept a brothel. True, I said, but it didn’t stop him from making ravishing pictures of courtesans.
“He must learn to do proper views of bridges and of deities; it’s what we need. We don’t need any more of those beauties! You can do them, Ei!”
Before long, Eisen left our studio.
A few disciples who reached a high standard were offered, for a fee, a derivation of Hokusai’s name. We had Hokki and Hokko and Hokuen. We had the beautiful Hokumei, a merchant’s daughter. We were for a time a studio of women. There were three daughters and Hokumei. She was ready to submit to my father’s will—or should I say whims? What else could she do? The North Star Studio was the only studio that worked with women. And we daughters had no choice either.
He saw it differently, of course. The Old Man would sit and sigh and draw furious designs, and pass them out to us where we worked, and complain in a lighthearted way that he was outnumbered. “I am your slave,” he would say. “I only work here. You are the boss!” The opposite was true, but this cajoling kept us happy.
I
HADN’T SEEN
Sanba for weeks and then a
gyoji,
a government worker, came to the studio. He sat alternately chewing on his lower lip and trying to catch the upper mustache in his teeth. I was working on a design for a laughing picture: a servant was ravishing the wife while the husband looked on. Officially banned, of course, it would sell well. The government man watched, his breath hissing in and out. He suspected he was being made a fool of—but it was always so difficult to tell, wasn’t it? Finally he said, “Did you hear that Shikitei Sanba is ill?”
I felt a shock, dull and pointless, as if I had been hit with a rubber mallet. My father kept his eyes on the painting in front of him.
“We have not,” said Hokusai.
“Oh, yes.” The
gyoji
was happy to share this delicious morsel. “He had a chest cough that would not go away and now . . .”
I knew that small, dry cough. Everyone in the theater knew it too: it was his stamp and seal. It came at intervals, a measure in his speech, a gesture giving weight to some pronouncement. Surely this little habit was not evidence of sickness. Did the
gyoji
know Sanba and I were lovers?
“Perhaps he has a cold or flu?”
“Oh, no. It is more than that. He is not expected to live.”
“Who told you that?” I said fiercely. I wanted to trace the information like a rat on the floor and stamp it dead.
“I heard it at Kyoden’s tobacco shop. Mitsu said the doctors told him there is something in his lungs.”
“What doctor? The students of Dutch medicine? Or the Chinese doctor?”
Sanba laughed at the Dutch scholars, their boundless determination to decipher the body, which he considered to be a mystery that should stay a mystery. He believed in instincts; he believed in signs; he believed in crazy medicaments and potions, even those he invented himself.
“The Western doctor came and told him it was too late. He’ll test the worth of his secret of eternal life, won’t he now?” mocked the government man. He raised one of his sharp eyebrows at me and backed out the door.
I remembered the teahouse in the thunderstorm; Sanba had talked about the art I would make. “I won’t be around to see it,” he’d said.
My father was drawing fat men. Fat men squatting, fat men reaching, fat men bathing, fat men dancing. Fat men bubbled in a stream off the end of his brush. Then he stopped and reached over to me, delicately withdrawing my picture of the servant and mistress in jolly congress. He substituted a double page of breaking waves. He had begun it: in the bottom half of the pages, the wave flattened and became relaxed lines of black and gray over the white of the page. In the upper half, the waves were advancing and looked like plumes, the black brushstrokes leaving the white of the paper as a blankness that came down with its own power.
“Finish,” he ordered.
Work was like that for me: piecework, factory work. One minute I was draping bosoms, the next making froth on a big rolling wave. I barked out a protest, but it was useless, so I concentrated on the waves. My tiny movements made black curves higher and higher on the page, matching his, diminishing in size, farther and farther off. There was no horizon; the waves filled the space to the top border. My back began to ache, so I stood and bent sideways. He lifted his head.
“Go, then! You’re not working, so it’s better that you run off the way you always do.”
That was so unfair I laughed. “Who helps you more than I do, Old Man?”
“No one. I know it. But you are thinking of Sanba.” He pouted.
“I almost believe you’re jealous.”
This was so impertinent it was funny. He smiled his wide, innocent smile.
“Jealous?” he said. “I have three daughters and you’re the last. If Sanba is unwell, I’ll be stuck with you.”
“You’ll be stuck with me anyway. Sanba has a wife.”
“Run and find him,” my father said.
It was raining softly. I took the umbrella and my short kimono jacket and fled to the boat dock. I had no money. But I saw a ferryman we knew and begged a ride north. He jerked his head that I should climb in. The rain stopped and the clouds lifted off the horizon and great squared yellow bars shot sideways from the place where the sun was disappearing.
I sat in the middle, near the flat surface of the river. The prow broke it, and the disturbed white undersides of the water folded back like a snarl. The ferryman stood high on the bow while his partner stood on the height of the stern, both with their long poles aloft. The back man pressed his pole down into the river bottom, leaning his whole weight over the end that drove into his sternum. They sang to keep in time: “Stroke! Make way! Stroke! Make way!”
As I traveled north, the light sank bit by bit until those low horizontal flares were extinguished. The city was dark and glowering. There were small fires in teahouses along the banks; I saw lanterns lit and hoisted on poles over the shops that faced the water. The ferryman in the bow swayed, the hard bulge of his calf muscle, his bare legs in the cold. In his confidence he hung out wide over the water.
From the water rose that dank smell, and I remembered Sanba’s nearness, an intimate smell that was easy to pick up through his black kimono. His face was always strange to me when we first met, even if we’d been together only the week before. Who is this codger? I would think. When I lay with him, he smiled on me with great sweetness and shortsightedness. His hands were cold. When I showed him my paintings, I was nervous. I wanted him to like them.
“You use strong colors,” he had said at first. Grinding pigments had been my job since I was small. I prided myself on the colors I made.
“Bad artists can have strong colors,” I said. “That is of no consequence.”
“It is. Colors count for a great deal. And you are not a bad artist. You may be a great one, and it will be a terror for us all,” he said. “You also have a good teacher.” I nodded. “But you must defeat him.”
Twice he had told me I must overcome my father. “Then,” he said, “we will all see your powers, and we’ll shake in our sandals.”
“Do you mean artists will fear me?”
“Already, already we do.” He laughed.
I looked down at my hands. I willed the complacent ferryman to push harder, stroke faster.
“It’s no fun to be the older one,” he had said once. “You’re young and have everything coming to you. I have had most of it. When you’re an old woman, you may have a young lover. Maybe then you’ll understand.”
I reached the Asakusa grounds. Crowds of men stood at the doors of the restaurants and teahouses. A street musician was remonstrating with his disobedient monkey, and a little crowd jeered. It began to rain again.
“Entertainment to the daimyo! See it here first. Watch what the noblemen and noblewomen watch in their homes in the High City.” The monkey was dressed in women’s clothes and had been taught to mince and play a flute. A boy passed a bowl to collect the coins that fell with a dull clink from dirty hands.
I pushed through the standing bodies, which were solid and resistant to my pressure. I made my way along the row of small houses with their closed screens and turned the corner into a side street, now mostly in darkness after the brightly lit market. Three, four doors in was where he would be. I came to a door: behind it I saw a single lamp burning.
When the screen opened, I bowed. My umbrella bowed with me, hiding my face. “Is this the place where Shikitei Sanba is resting?” I whispered.
“Who are you?”
The woman stood erect, and her voice was strong. I felt her eyes boring holes in my umbrella. I tipped it up and looked into the face. A woman older than me, but not a dragon. She drew in her breath. She rocked back a little, then forward. She knew the situation. She was enjoying her revenge.
“So the news has flushed out the lowlife,” she said.
Her rudeness gave me strength. No need to repent, then. I raised my head. “I have come to inquire about his health.”
“His health is not good. The signs can no longer be ignored.”
It seemed an accusation, as if I had been ignoring signs, as if I were complicit in this illness. I let the umbrella fall and the rain come down on my head. I would drown if she wanted me to, here in the rain. But she didn’t want that either.
“You might as well come in.” She stepped back. I came over the doorsill. From the back came his voice. Vinegar, with angry wit. “Enchantress, are we entertaining?”
“We are not entertaining,” his wife called hoarsely. “We are caring for the sick, and the sick is you.”
“Ah, yes,” said Sanba, and he gave his little cough. “We mustn’t forget, must we?” The cough was stronger. But his voice was no weaker. The music of its bass, the rumble convivial, the tickle of it inviting laughter. He’s not ill, I thought. He’s the same!
She saw me take heart.
“Don’t be encouraged,” she said coldly. “Your eyes will tell you what your ears will not.”
“If we’re not entertaining, who has come in?” The voice of Sanba was a beautiful thing.
“It is your girl.”
Silence from the back room. I could picture his sudden childish look of being caught. His wife swung her hand sideways: go to him.