I did laugh then. Not at his bad art but at his crazy idea that I would keep house.
Laughing at an angry man is never wise.
Usually when a husband was dissatisfied, he took a broom and swept his wife out the door. To be banished like that was lucky: he might have killed her. The punishment for a crime of passion—or is it a crime of possession?—was not severe. The babies remained with him, so all he had to do was get a new wife to care for them, while the first wife returned to her family in shame.
When Tomei reached for the broom, I decided to save him the trouble. I tucked my brushes in my kimono, put on my quilted coat, and slid out the door. I was very sad to leave the dinner.
There was a saying: “See a woman running in Kamakura, no need to ask where. Just point the way.”
The Temple of Refuge was called Tokei-ji. A woman of a noble family had founded it, and its courtiers wore the imperial crest. It was the only way for a woman to get a divorce by herself. You had to run. If you reached the temple before your husband caught you, you were safe. The pictures we saw of this place featured a woman throwing her sandals ahead of her through the temple gates, her husband making a grab for her hair from behind.
I stormed through the crowds on the streets of Shitamachi. I felt the wind on my face. I felt alive. I was angry. I was often angry, but this time my anger was outside, free, in the world. How exhilarating it felt! To think that Tomei might divorce me. My pride was offended. This in itself was amazing. I took so much grief from the Old Man that I had not known I had pride. I crashed into a porter with a heavy burden and he screamed at me. My face was wet. I slowed. I needed to think. My life was at a balance point; it could tip either way—into disaster or back into tedium and mediocrity.
“Use your sense, Chin-Chin,” I said. “Not your bile.” Shino would have said that. “You are not being pursued by demons. Slow down.”
I was not being pursued by my husband. I knew that. And yet I felt like a fugitive. I had nowhere to go. If I stayed in Edo, I would have to go back to my home. If I presented myself to my family, they would tell me to go back: “We don’t need another divorce! Look what happened to O-Miyo!” I knew what their advice would be. And so I did not seek it. I decided to go to the Temple of Refuge.
It was five stops along the Tokaido to Totsuka. At Totsuka you turned off the route and went over the mountains to Tokei-ji. I had to get to the eastern edge of the city and then through the gates.
I couldn’t get out of Edo alone. That was the law: “No women out. No guns in.” I would need help. Who could I go to? I could only think of Mune, my student.
It was winter and snow began to fall, wet snow that melted on the stones. I walked on, pleasantly invisible in the white downpour, which thickened by the minute. It muted the noise of carts and made people seem far away. A strange euphoria took me. I must have walked all day. I was walking away from all the confinement I had felt, for years. My joy at escaping carried me all the way to the Ichibee bookstore, where the
rangaku-sha
gathered.
In the warm glow of this little shop, scholars sat in groups with their domed heads and fluid draperies, drinking tea. They spoke of ideas. How different their world was from mine. I pushed aside the door and entered.
The owner, who had once given me a boy’s haircut, had not forgotten Hokusai’s daughter. He made me welcome, although the solemn scientists hardly slowed their gossip to glance in my wet direction—hair soaked and straggling, hem heavy. He gave me a chair by the stove and a bowl of tea.
“Is the master in good health?”
“Oh yes, indeed,” I said, as I always did. His true condition was a secret.
Outside, the snow redoubled itself, piling on the edges of fences and on the top of every branch and twig. A black cat hating to get his feet wet jumped from post to fence and then went under the awning.
Finally, the door chime tinkled for the last time and the
rangaku-sha
were gone.
“Now tell me. What brings you?” said the storekeeper.
“I must leave Edo. I need help to get past the checkpoint.”
“May I ask why?”
No one was allowed to aid a runaway wife. “Better for you if you don’t,” I said. “A student will help me if you can send a messenger.”
The bookseller’s boy trudged in with his pack of volumes on his back. He got a scolding for letting the snow get onto the books. His umbrella was so heavy with the white stuff he let it drop, he said. He was given another errand to do: to find Mune and give her a letter.
I slept as my father so often slept, draped over myself beside the heating table
.
Outside and in my dreams, the snow fell and fell, covering my footsteps. In the morning I was dry and warm, and the bell tinkled. In came a figure wrapped in a black traveling hood: Mune.
I told her where I wanted to go: Tokei-ji. “My poor Oei,” she said. “I had no idea.”
“Please, no pity. My husband does not abuse me. I abuse him, more likely,” I said. It was comical, and we both laughed.
In Mune’s sedan chair with its curtained windows, the two of us approached the checkpoint at the edge of Edo. The bearers had been instructed to say that there was only one noblewoman inside. But the guards with their swords saw the effort it took the bearers to hold the chair up.
“Wait! You are smuggling! What is in there?”
I was ordered out and stood shivering in front of two boorish inquisitors. They hacked and spit and scratched their private parts. Clearly they sat too long with nothing to do but harass passing women. “Where are you going? Why do you try to leave with no papers? What is your reason?”
I wondered for the first time how my sister O-Miyo had managed this. I had never asked her and now she was dead. These men were beneath me: I couldn’t bother to lie.
“I’m going to the divorce temple.”
The men laughed. “Why?”
“My husband doesn’t like my cooking.”
They laughed some more. They grabbed me by the arm. “We should give you cooking lessons. That will keep you till he comes along.”
“You will be disappointed. He enjoys my cooking so little that he isn’t even chasing me,” I said. “I don’t sew either.”
This time I laughed along with them. Mune slid her window open and coughed. We all went quiet. “Miss Oei amuses you. But she is a distinguished artist,” she said. “She is my teacher, and I am taking her to a temple where she will paint pictures for the altar.” She waved a letter. “Here is the commission.”
The chief guard leaned out of his little wooden tower and waved us on. We hurried so we would be out of sight before they put their heads together.
About an hour down the road Mune gave me her heavy black headscarf and squeezed my shoulders. “I can’t go any farther. But you will sleep in the inn at Totsuka.” Then she and her bearers turned back and before long were invisible.
I began to walk again. The snow was a gift from the gods. It smoothed the path before me and filled my footsteps behind. I had not been out of the city since I was a child. It was not a day for tourism, that was true. But it was beautiful. I could see nothing of the land—or the water—on either side of the path. There was no color in the world, only me with my black wrapper, like an unreadable character, an ink blot. I was going to an unknown existence.
Because of the snow, a carter took pity and gave me a ride to Kawasaki. I repaid him with a sketch of his mule. I looked at the sea—white-whiskered, and getting more so. People passed me, bent under umbrellas that were themselves bent under a fat cushion of snow. I walked on. My feet grew cold. I went to a teashop and warmed them. No one pursued me. No one wanted me back. No one knew where I had gone.
I dawdled, an ox between masters. A woman on her own. Thinking ahead to all the years of my life and savoring, in advance, the pleasure of being myself. I would go to the temple and make sure the bonds of the marriage were officially undone. I would bow that far to custom and law. After that, I would be free.
Kawasaki, in summer, was covered in barley fields waving to the sea. Now it was dry brown sticks poking through the blanket of a vast snow plain. I could not get as far as the inn at Totsuka in such weather. I begged a bed at a temple. The next day I took the ferry over the Rokugo River. I rode with a carter from Kawasaki down to Totsuka and alighted smelling of fish, the snow still falling blankly and without haste from a sullen sky.
Here was the inn Mune spoke of, just at the side of the Tokaido in Totsuka. A friend to the
ukiyo-e
artists owned it. Bunzo had bought scroll paintings from my father. If I introduced myself, he would take me in. But would he tell his other guests? Would they laugh at me? I did not want to break the spell.
It was easy to be unrecognized. It wasn’t as if people stared and wondered. They just didn’t see me. I sat hunched in a dark corner until the latest hour. I watched Bunzo among the guests. He was a good man and would be kind to poor women who showed up in storms. I let him assume that I was one of the usual fugitives. There was no danger of his remembering my face. Without my father, I was nobody. Luckily I had a little money, and I bought a place for the night beside the stove.
In the morning they gave me tea and a lunch of dried fish and rice. The innkeeper stood wordless in the doorway with his hand outstretched: a path led up to Kamakura. I took it, leaving the Tokaido behind.
The snow had stopped. The sky was blue. The path was steep but wide, trodden for centuries by courtiers, desperate women, and furious men. In places, the snow was caught in the high pine canopy, leaving the ground bare. But in other places, it was deep. I made the first footsteps, and these footprints remained behind me. I passed courtiers on the way down. They gestured onward: “Not too much farther! That was the steepest bit!” One gave me hot tea.
It was dark and the snow had begun again when I came to a small temple to the Fox God. There was a candle burning there. I stepped inside and rubbed my hands over the flame. I breathed into the cup of my palms and drew that breath back inside me: warmth. I stepped back onto the path and looked up. Finally I saw, just off the path, a set of steps leading up into the hill.
I climbed into the tops of the trees. There were lanterns. There was a temple roof. For the first time I hesitated. I had come all this way. Was I doing the right thing? I was discarding a man’s protection in a world for men only. Was it foolish?
Yes.
But was I prepared to cook?
No.
Here was the gate. No one chased me. I did not have to throw my shoes ahead to assure my safety. I walked slowly and thoughtfully under its welcome roof and stood in the courtyard in silence. I could hear the nuns singing. I went toward the voices.
I don’t remember how they welcomed me that night. How did I ever get warm? The marrow of my bones had frozen solid. I was wet up past my knees.
“Is anyone pursuing you?” the nuns wanted to know. They waved their incense over me.
“No,” I said.
“It is a tribute to your great strength to arrive in such weather.”
I
STAYED FOR
three months. I described my innocent husband to the Suigetsu Kannon, a tiny female stone figure who stood beside the pool and gazed at the full moon in the water. “He is not angry. He is not violent. He does not drink to excess, and I have not been beaten.”
The water shimmered; the Kannon maintained her curious fraction of a smile. “What on earth do you find fault with, then?” she seemed to say.
“He does not see me. He wants me to cook and sew,” I said. “He wants me to be other than what I am.”
My grievances sounded petty even to my own ears. Other fugitives had bruises and scaldings; they screamed in their dreams.
“What woman expects to be seen for herself?”
I did.
“Do you have children?”
“No, I do not. I am barren.”
“Does he berate you for being barren?”
“No, he does not. I am glad to be barren. I need every hour of my day to paint.” I found that I did have complaints about him. “He resents my work. He resents my old father. He fears me, and fear makes him cruel.”
These merciful nuns heard and did not criticize me. They understood study and prayer, and they understood the need for silence. They alone allowed that art made its demands on my person. They had their methods to secure the divorce I wanted. They set about it. There was no contest. The husband had to file a letter of just three and a half lines. Tomei’s epistle, written on thick mulberry paper in careful brushwork, arrived to join the hundreds of other letters kept in the treasure house.
“She is not a proper wife. I do not want her and release her. She is free to go where she likes and to marry whomever she pleases. She is useless to me.”
I read it by the pool. The Kannon winked. She had saved me. But I was to be called “useless.” That was the price. I folded the paper and tucked it in my sleeve.
Spring came. The grounds were covered in moss; the old stones greened with it, the grasses luminous in their newness. I walked in the graveyard, where there were statues of famous nuns of the past. I wandered the gardens and painted the flowers—narcissus, hydrangea. I walked out to the harbor. It was April, the season for fishing bonito.