He was staring at the ceiling. I could see the glint of his bottles: he was using his own ridiculous remedies, his secret elixirs for immortality.
His features were sharper than ever. His skin was a little yellow, his cheeks were hollow, and around his eyelashes there was a crusted crystal substance that made the lids sparkle.
“Sanba.”
“Ah! She’s right! It is my girl.” His hand drifted out.
I was not a girl. I had been when we started. But now I was twenty-two.
I wanted to lie with him and curl toward the warmth of him. But he was hot; the air smelled bad. I was repelled, and anyway his wife was there. And where was the child?
“I tell you what I want,” he continued, as if I had asked. “An outing. We will meet at the theater,” he said. “Buy sticky rice and take it with us to the Nakamura. But instead of staying all day, we will leave at dusk. We will take a little boat to the Three Forks and lie under the trees.”
His wife stood just behind me.
“Get your father to release you. On the night of the full moon. It is how many days from now? I’m losing track,” he said. “I lie here and try to open my eyes, and the days slide away from me. But I will be better then.”
“Full moon is in five days.”
“On that day I will meet you at the Nakamura. If you can manage to get away.” His attention wandered.
I was forgotten, a leftover doll from carefree, cut-away days that had even then been entirely separate from his life, this wife, this mattress, this stared-at ceiling. I had no place here, and yet the voice, the profile in the dark—it was him. He was mine.
His wife dug her toe into my buttock.
“Go on, speak.” She was asking me to bring him back.
“Sanba,” I whispered.
“Yes.”
“We’re nearly finished the album of laughing pictures. You know, the story about the servant and the mistress who are lovers. And she dreams of taking to the road with him . . .”
We talked about our work this way.
He gave a little expiration of air. “I wish you luck with it,” he said. He said it in a way that showed he understood everything: the work, the dream, even the toe in my tail.
“You are an artist, and it will never be easy,” he said. “If you’re lucky and if you’re clever, you will survive. Promise me something.”
What could I promise? Why would I promise?
“Anything. It will keep me hoping,” he said.
“I promise to make the best colors in Edo,” I said.
“Ah,” he said.
The voice was captive, in his body and in that little house. I imagined I would steal it away. Wrap it in a cloth, in cardboard, roll it and put it in a scroll box. I would free it from this room and from this sickness. I would unroll it when I too lay on my mat staring up through the top of the house, staring into the stars and the sky, or where they would be if the roof were taken off, as if it were made by artists in that lying way, making the inside outside. His voice would be in the stars, and I would go there too. We would look down and see ourselves: tiny, finger-sized creatures in the maze of streets and screens and walls and alleyways and narrow canals that was Edo.
“Sanba?” I said.
He came back. “Yes?”
“If the day is not good?”
“Then we will take a rain check,” he said. As he said the words “rain check,” his voice cracked. It was just a small crack, through that low, masculine, scratchy voice. I heard it. As if he might, if he stopped, break down. As if the crust might split and something hot, scalding, true, deep, and violent would break out. I never knew what that something was, what he might have said if we had met as before. That was his good-bye.
My face was wet. The wife sat watching me with faint curiosity. She didn’t trouble to be angry with me. The son, a handsome boy of ten, came in. Ministrations were in order. The patient seemed to sleep. I had only dreamed our long hours together, the white paint and the red slashes on the faces of the actors, the lying down and the getting up to go to the teahouse for sake. The grisly murders and black rages we sat through—with him scribbling and me shouting—were ghost scenes. Real life, this tamed and vapid thing, this yellowed, patchy remnant, had taken its sad victory.
I wormed my way backward out the door and over the threshold. I knew I had made it only when I heard the rain falling on my umbrella like the crackling of some fire.
My father took one look at me and knew. He showed no emotion at what must have been, for him too, tragic news about a friend. He examined the page of waves and passed me a page of comb designs. We worked in silence. The hardness in my father steadied me. He did not have to speak. What he had to say was palpable: What did I expect? People had wives—that was a given. People became ill. People fell by the wayside, foundered, and died. They were the weak. Sanba had fallen prey.
There was even a sense not of vindication, exactly, but of affirmation: my father had won. Shikitei Sanba, noted expert on the Kabuki, satirist and peer, purveyor of the elixir of immortality, had been caught by the demons, while Hokusai went on. He was sixty-two years old—by ordinary measure, already an ancient man. But he would not die. Not yet.
We sat working. I felt the impermanence of our surroundings, my father’s imperative to live. Work dried up. Censors got on your trail. Illness stalked. You had to reinvent, rename, and reposition. You had to fight off the oncoming threat. Outlive the others.
But why was I thinking about my father? Sanba was leaving me. I could feel it. It was in the air. How many days would it be?
When I was too tired to sit, I fell forward onto my crossed arms. I hunched over the floor, my eyes closed against the flesh of my forearms, and waited for my father to berate me.
He didn’t. When his hand came, it was a surprise. It was a heavy hand, just there on my right shoulder, at the back near the nape of my neck. It was a kindly hand. A touch one might give to a fellow-in-arms. It was the hand of one warrior to another, admitting me to the whole of it: life, death, art. And survival.
His hand warmed me. Then he nudged me upright.
I wiped my face on my sleeve.
He took the comb designs and looked them over. Hmm, he said. And, Haaa. Ahh. He liked them. I went out to the well and splashed cold water on my face. When I came back inside, he looked at me and seemed to see me afresh.
“You must marry,” he said.
T
HERE WAS ANOTHER
painter in the North Star Studio. His name was Minamizawa Tomei. He was the son of an oil seller. He was gentle, with the eyes of a child and a shuffling gait. He longed to work with Hokusai. But my father could teach only those who taught themselves. So I worked with Tomei instead and he relied on my example.
I liked him. At the sake houses after work, he was company. We listened to the women with their heads bent over
samisen
. He sang like a bird. We clowned together. Since Sanba’s death, I was the punster.
My father asked us one question after we announced our intention to marry: “Why do you drink sake?”
“To let go of the hours of the day.”
“Ah! I see!” he said. “Not me. I wish to hold on to every minute.”
I was cruel to my husband. Some people said, “Oei is the daughter of a master and she laughs at the no-talent son of an oil seller.” That is another of the scurrilous accusations of history, and I dispute it. I married him for friendship. It would have been worse if I hadn’t.
I was young and felt old, as if I had lived a famous life already. I had been the companion of Shikitei Sanba, and people crowded our table after the theater. But with Sanba gone, I was cut down to size, married to a man who would never add up to anything. He was gentle, it was true. He was kind; that was odd. Young women often have an unfair reaction to kindness: when someone is unfailingly so, they are not grateful. They begin to despise that person.
Ah, kindness, Sanba would have said. You hear about it—isn’t it a kind of skin rash? Can it be got off with soap?
I shaved my thick eyebrows on marriage. This widened forehead, as we called it, was the only obvious change in my life. You could still see my frown; it was carved into my flesh. I still went drinking. I was missing love. I took to pulling strands of hair from the tight knot at my nape and chewing on them. I rubbed my eyebrows where the stubble grew back in. When I walked out in the morning to buy breakfast, Sanba’s form—that particular slope of his shoulders and his languid, narrow gait—went ahead of me, stepping sideways out of the traffic into a bookshop.
I dodged into that nook where new volumes lay. I let my eyes run over the latest prints of beauties by Eisen and Hiroshige—beautiful but without energy, without sympathy. Simpering, lank figures with bloated faces. My father was represented by his books of instruction:
Manga,
series VI and series VII.
Blind People.
Skinny People and Fat People.
Good but silly. A horse bucking and a woman in black on high clogs, standing on the rope that tethered the horse. We were in the 1820s. He was perhaps fading. “Hokusai will not die,” Sanba had predicted. “He will go on for a long time. He has ingenuity, and he has you.”
Under the counter, contraband but available to everyone, were the
shunga
that my father—and I, too—produced: couples grappling, huge nether parts waving in the breeze as clothes parted conveniently.
I was supposed to be grateful to Tomei for having me. But I dismissed him with a short expulsion of breath in the top of my mouth: “Ugh!” He brought me tea: “Ugh!” It was cold. He put brush to paper: “Ugh!” There was too much ink.
Nothing disturbed his good humor. He smiled, taking his eyes off the page and letting the ink spread out from the tip of the brush.
“Now you’ve ruined it.”
He tried to kiss me when I was annoyed. Whereas I wanted to kiss him only when he was cold to me, and he never was.
“Come, let’s go out to eat eel,” he would say. “I have money today. We can walk along the riverbank.”
My shoulders rose and I bit my lip. “You’re bothering me. Can’t you see I’m working?”
It was not his fault: it was only that he was not Sanba. He didn’t know about Sanba, but he ought to have. People did. He didn’t pick up clues from my experienced behavior on the futon. But he was a child, a dreamer.
To add to my crimes, then, I made him a fool. I knew that. Some days I couldn’t look at him. His delight with a piece of watermelon, the sticky, sweet water running down his chin—I had been that innocent before. The way he clapped palms with the man who sold divining poems written on little bits of paper. And that sheepish laugh, huh huh huh, his shoulders lifting as if they were strung up.
“I don’t know why you became an artist at all,” I said, standing beside him one day as he knelt on the road, picking up coals from the remains of a cooking fire that had been kicked over. “You aren’t really interested in art.” How had I become so mean? “You’re only interested in broken things,” I said in disgust.
“I
am
interested in broken things,” he said. He smiled and I thought, he’s going to say it’s why he likes me! “But you are not broken, my pumpkin. You are strong and whole.”
He had read my mind. Unforgivable. I made a face.
He kissed me. He loved me! Why? Why? I wanted Sanba, but Sanba was dead. In a candid moment I told Tomei that the way to get my love was to be cold. Mock me. “Only boil in secret and in the dark,” I instructed.
But he boiled at low temperature, in no time and without shame. And then he boiled over. He tried to make me “vanish,” the term we used in
shunga
for climax. Nothing. “It is not your fault,” I told him, taking pity. He fell away from me. I was a bad clam, the one in the broth whose shell would not open.
I wanted to extinguish his love for me.
Of course, when you truly want that, you will finally get it. After a time Tomei smiled less on me. I was killing his love. Immediately I regretted it. “Don’t give up on me,” I would whisper to him after he fell asleep. “I’m trying.”
T
HEN CAME THE
time when the public did not want Hokusai’s pictures. He had a bad year, and another bad year: all those years were bad. Troubles came to us and stayed. Have I enumerated the deaths in my family? The first was my father’s son by his first wife. He who, like my father, had been adopted by the Nakajima family, possibly his blood relatives, to be heir to the mirror-polishing business. But unlike my father, my brother had made a success of it. When he died, with him died the sum of money we got every year from his employer.
My sister O-Miyo, married to the drinker and gambler Shigenobu, finally ran for her life to the divorce temple. She returned with her son to live with the family. The boy was trouble. She sent him back to his father, who did not like him either. He roamed the neighborhood, bullying younger children and the harmless poor. I saw him try to choke the fee collector at the shooting range when he was not even ten. Then O-Miyo developed a wracking cough. She died when she was thirty. The boy was ours. My mother tried but could not control him.