Tucked away farther down our alley were a storytellers’ hall, a barbershop, and a shooting gallery. This last was mainly an entertainment for lovers. My sisters and I used to watch the men put their arms around the ladies’ shoulders, showing them where to rest the shaft of the arrow. At the end of the alley, with its back to the water, stood a small temple to the god of the harvest, Inari. Wild cats lived on that water margin, feeding on rats and garbage. I liked the cats very much, and their stealthy ways.
Beyond the alley were shops and stalls. You could buy anything: a bolt of indigo cotton, wooden bowls, cutting tools of every size and shape, mulberry paper, straw sandals. Raw voices were always hawking, shouting to make way, or crying down abuse on animals. Everything moved by—people and barrows and horses and mules and more people.
The High City loomed over us. On top of the hill the castle stood, in a huge empty space. People said its dungeon used to be higher than the distant peak of Mount Fuji, three days’ walk away. But it burned down in a fire, and most of the Low City with it. That happened before I was born, and before my father was born. But we knew the story. Flames ate the bridges and trapped the inhabitants between the canals so they couldn’t escape. On windy nights you could hear their ghosts screaming still.
From the castle, moat water trickled down to join the Sumida River, which ran down to Edo Bay, where the patient fishermen stood on stilts. Beyond the bay was a wide world of water—nothing more. My father said there were other countries and other peoples in a great world beyond. It was hard to believe him.
We were at the starting place: from here, foot roads led to the far points of our country. We had no idea of its shape. Maps were illegal for us. Townsmen were not to know where the limits of the shogun’s power might lie. But we could follow the dark ribbon of the Sumida against its current, northward.
That being the only journey we could make, we often did so. The Sumida was wide and powerful. The water gleamed despite the garbage it swilled away. The banks of the river were worn smooth by constant foot traffic and the loading of boats. Those banks divided the city itself from the water. They were a long strip of playground, a free place somehow agreed upon by the
bakufu
to belong to us, the disreputables. I would sit in the ferry as it plugged along and watch. Down on those banks I might see anything—fortune-tellers, beggars, children flying kites, women dancing.
T
HE NORTH SEVEN
Stars formed the Great Dipper. My father showed me how to find them in the sky. We looked along the line made by the outside of the bowl. Followed it to see Myoken, the shining eye of all the gods. Myoken was constancy; it was the writers’ star. My father worshipped it.
I remember the night he decided to rename himself. This time his name would honor the North Star: it would be Hokusai.
“We will follow it,” he said.
We always walked then. I had become too big to ride on my father’s shoulders. As we walked, I could hear the river chug, could hear his feet on the stones and the wailing of cats. But I could not see much. It was late afternoon, winter, and darkness was already on us. Women stood around their outside cooking fires, children tugging their skirts. There was the pounding of a wooden club on barrels, a girl fulling cloth. A rowing song echoed on the water.
We came into light, lamplight from teashops, bookstores, a man with hot coals in an iron pot. On we went, and the city dwindled to marsh and then began to rise again. We came to the Kabuki area. Here were the great theaters with their waving banners, pushing crowds, the thundering drums announcing a play about to begin.
“Kabuki is just as wicked as our pictures. But they’ll never shut this place down,” muttered my father. “They wouldn’t dare.”
But the theater was not respectable either. Actors were like us—not officially people. They were restricted to this part of town, in the heart of the city. Still the rich merchants came, and their wives. The poor came too, going without a meal to buy a ticket. Even the noble ladies came, in disguise. They fell in love with actors. I had often heard those stories. Banned, and therefore popular. That was how it worked.
“I used to paint here,” he grumbled, “before you were born. The actors, the wrestlers—I hated it. You have to sit in the audience. You have to be a reporter.”
Two of the slender boys who were training to play the parts of women in the Kabuki theater came giggling along.
We listened to their squeaky voices.
“He said he would give us one gold
ryo
if—”
“You didn’t believe him, did you? Don’t be an idiot.”
I agreed. One gold
ryo
was enough money to buy rice for one person for a full year.
The other one started to wail in a high, breaking voice.
“You’re not supposed to cry; you’re an
act
or. All this is a
play.
”
“But I’m hungry.” The smaller boy plucked at the other boy’s costly coat sleeve. I watched the first boy hurry him along. The wind was blowing and the lantern was swinging overhead, shedding its gaudy light. I was hungry, too. But I had a father and a home. Boys like that lived in the part of town where children were sold as prostitutes.
I was so tired. It seemed I walked through sleep into wakefulness, from darkness into light. Ahead I saw a street bobbing with lanterns. We had arrived at the Nightless City, the pleasure district. We had walked from poverty into the jolly, gaudy plenitude that turned men from serfs into new, free creatures. Men, not women. Women were always servants.
I heard the drums, the wailing singers, the shrieks of laughter. I stepped more quickly, holding my father’s hand. This was the Yoshiwara, the licensed quarters, where pleasures prohibited elsewhere were magically permitted as long as a tax was paid to the
bakufu.
My father was in search of work.
I loved the Yoshiwara. In the Yoshiwara, we townspeople were kings—better than kings if we had a little money. Boat after ferryboat pushed off the docks, the high curved bows and sterns looming over us, the oarsmen with their long poles standing up in the wind and shouting to one another as they steered out into the clear. There was a lot of traffic. Travelers, laborers, bored samurai—all of these flocked northward into the wind as the sun began to set. The men would stay until they were shooed out and the Great Gate locked in the hours before dawn.
In the Yoshiwara, pleasure cost money. Money bought silk and velvet futons and food, music and sake—and women. The women collected the money, but they never kept it. They gave it to brothel owners and housekeepers, drummer boys and caterers. The clients were bled dry, then ejected by the guard. But that would be later, after a long night of pleasure. If we ever came here during the day, we would come face-to-face with these defeated men trudging south. But now it was evening, the best time, and we climbed over the rounded bridge with the seven stars above us and the houses of pleasure laid out in front.
On Nakanocho Boulevard, the main street, paper lanterns cast pools of red light on the wet snow. The noodle shop with its cartoon—“Fortify Yourself Before the Deed!”—was dark. Cauldrons that had boiled all day, rattling and steaming, now crouched half-seen on the burners. Next door, Waki’s tattoo parlor was also dark, but Waki himself lay on the floor in the rectangle of streetlight under his door curtain. My father stopped only a few steps from his ear.
“What are you doing, Waki?” He nudged him with his toe.
It was plain that he was sleeping. But my father hated to see anyone idle.
Waki pushed himself up with his elbows. “I am concocting a design of dragon’s tail and thunderbolt entwined. It will take hours to do the needlework, but it will be astonishing.” He smiled with his eyes closed, envisioning it.
“Ah,” said Hokusai. He loosened my hand and let me go. He stretched, soaking in the air of this place.
Waki lifted his curtain to let us into his shop. He had a high table there for his customers to lie on. He lit a small oil lamp. His designs were pinned on the walls. My father liked Waki: he was a simple peasant who had come to the city from the southern provinces to make his fortune. He stood beside his curtain, bowed, and gave his spiel automatically when we entered.
“I was born to a family of embroiderers in a village in Kyushu. I am good with a needle. I trained on the thick velvet and brocade that sold to warrior families. By contrast, skin is a pitiful fabric.”
We nodded as if we had not heard this before.
“But for one thing.” Waki rolled his shoulders back and then shifted side to side, making eyes at me. “The movements of flesh! Such possibilities! You see—I can drape the dragon’s body over the man’s left shoulder and down the arm.” He pantomimed. “The round muscles over the shoulder blade bulge, and so does the dragon. The sharp bone of the elbow becomes the arrowhead point of the dragon’s tail.”
“It would take you hours to create this tattoo—but it would be marvelous,” agreed my father.
“I’ll give it to the next man who comes in the door who can stand the pain. What should I charge? One
ryo
in gold?”
“That’s one month’s wage for a laborer.”
“But he won’t be a laborer. One thousand
mon
?”
“That’s five days’ wages.”
“Not too much, do you think? For my artistry?”
“Not too much if they have it.”
A man stepped into the doorway behind us. An umbrella was tipped low over his head. Only his thin, wrapped calves and boxlike body were visible; his face was in shadow.
“What do you want?” said Waki sharply.
The man let the umbrella tip back and stepped into the lamplight.
There was no need to speak. The character for “dog” was tattooed on the stranger’s forehead. There was only one place he could have got it: in the
bakufu
jailhouse. It was the mark of a criminal.
“Take this off,” the stranger rasped. What had they done to him, to his voice?
Waki said he could not. The tattoo would not come off. That’s why they put it there. To mark him forever.
The man came closer. “Then make it the color of skin, so it won’t show.”
“I can’t,” Waki said. He was afraid. I felt the fear. “I would end up in jail myself.”
The criminal cursed and roughly brushed the curtain aside, stepping back out into the street. He turned toward the end, where the low-class brothels were, and ran. We stared after him.
“Pity the women who are too poor to refuse his business,” said my father.
I noticed he had sympathy for women, especially when they were not in his family.
Waki turned down his lamp. “I’m closed anyway,” he said. He shooed us out, looking nervously down the street after his fleeing visitor.
“Turn your mind back to the fantastic dragon, conjure the scallops you’ll draw for scales, and hope it puts you to sleep,” Hokusai said.
Next door, Mitsu hovered over her shop counter. A man in a black traveling cloak stood with his back to us, looking at the goods. Mitsu’s large mouth stretched and twisted. She had thick, dark brows and her eyes had huge black-rimmed bags beneath them—another socket, another brow. My father always said she looked like she wore actors’ makeup; she exaggerated her expressions to go with her moods. She used to be a housekeeper in a brothel, that’s what he said. She knew her business.
“What this one would do! Oh! Don’t you want to see?” She lowered her eyelids and rolled her pupils skyward. Dildos made of turtle shell winked in a wooden case under her fingers. Elegant dried seahorses lay side by side on velvet. There were also cowrie shells, which I had seen my father use to pour out medicine for my mother when she was about to give birth. And in the very back, a wooden box contained a bear claw, used to stroke the pregnant stomach. For the right customer she would lift the cloth that covered all these. But he was not the right customer. He turned to us, and I could see that he was as poor as we were. He turned away. She pressed her lips together and pushed out her chin: she covered her precious toys. She leveled a look of scorn at his back. She turned the look on us.
“What brings you out tonight? With that one?” She jerked her chin at me. She hated children. We weren’t good for business.
My father was shabby; he was thin. I was proud of him, and I thought he should be rich. I did not know that being a great artist meant forgoing a thick mattress or a fine meal. I learned it soon enough.
I stood up straight and glared at Mitsu. If she was going to insult him, she would have to deal with me.
“Looking to see what’s new,” said Hokusai evasively.
“New? It’s all new. No one likes old things today.” She shrugged, and he nodded: in this, she was right. “The public is fickle,” she said.
He wore nothing to distinguish himself from the trudging crowds of poor who thronged the streets of Edo. This made him stand out in the Yoshiwara, where everyone was dressed to show off. But he was not to be scorned. He was not a drunkard or a spendthrift. He didn’t go into debt to buy courtesans, starving his children. We starved anyway. He was a window-shopper. That was free.